American musician and songwriter
Peter Matthew Bauer carved out a niche for himself primarily as a founding member of Top 30-charting indie rock group
the Walkmen, but was active both before his tenure with that band and after its nebulous dissolution.
Bauer was one of the founding members of
the Recoys, an independent band from Boston that began in 1996. When
the Recoys split up in 1999, both
Bauer and bandmate
Hamilton Leithauser went on to join fledgling act
the Walkmen with some players from the also recently disbanded
Jonathan Fire*Eater.
Bauer played bass and organ in
the Walkmen for 14 years before they went on hiatus in 2014, and he quickly set to work completing solo material under his own name.
Bauer's soul-searching solo debut,
Liberation!, was issued in 2014 on the Mexican Summer imprint. He followed it in 2017 with
Mount Qaf (Divine Love), a collection of broadly defined love songs released by Fortune Tellers/Kobalt. ~ Fred Thomas