Chopping It Up with Charlie Hall
"Just keep on and keep on until you reach higher ground."
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It’s Charlie Hall Week on LAST CALL
This week, Charlie Hall, the Philadelphia musician and Grammy Award-winning drummer for The War on Drugs, will be sitting in on LAST CALL for a two-part feature. Today’s dispatch includes an interview with Hall and a recipe for a new cocktail he’s been shaking up in heavy rotation at home, and on Friday he’ll be back for Dive Bar Jukebox with a killer playlist along with tales from his favorite dive bars and the story of his own 1963 Seeburg jukebox.
Hall is winding down from an epic, year-long world tour with The War on Drugs in support of their latest album, I Don’t Live Here Anymore. My most-played song on Spotify last year was “Pain,” from their 2017 album A Deeper Understanding, which seemed to capture the overall mood of 2021. And I’m pretty sure the title track of the new album, featuring an assist from Lucius, will be sitting at the top of my most-played song of 2022.
Hall, a former high school music teacher, is a native New Englander who grew up in Connecticut and Rhode Island. He and his wife Anne moved to San Francisco in 1996, where he pursued a music career while working in record shops and restaurants. They’ve been in Philadelphia since 2003 where Hall met Adam Granduciel, the founder and frontman for The War on Drugs. Hall was part of the band on and off from the early days and joined full time in 2013.
Among Hall’s many talents and pursuits is a very strong cocktail game. He often entertains at home and used to tour with a bespoke cocktail kit packed with bar spoons, mixing tins, various sized jiggers, cheater bottles of liqueurs, and plenty of bitters. And it was bitters that first connected us. Hall is good friends with my publisher, Aaron Wehner, and after Hall made the grapefruit bitters from my book, Bitters, he reached out via email.
We stayed in touch but I didn’t meet Hall and his wife Anne in person until a dinner party at Wehner’s home in San Francisco in October 2017. I was on tour for Distillery Cats and Hall was on the West Coast swing of the A Deeper Understanding tour with The War on Drugs. (And, yes, I realize touring for a book about cats isn’t very “rock and roll.”) The next stop for both of us was Seattle. I shared a list of some of my favorite restaurants and Hall invited me to see their show at the Moore Theatre. I always love receiving enthusiastic texts from Hall when he’s on the road sharing a photo of a great dive bar or the lineup of amari bottles at cool bar.
One of Hall’s longtime side projects is The Silver Ages, an a cappella, close harmony vocal ensemble made up of some members of The War on Drugs and a host of local Philadelphia musicians who stage an annual Holiday Show benefit at the Philadelphia Ethical Society recital hall on Rittenhouse Square. When I was in town for the Philly Chef Conference at Drexel University, Hall invited me to stop by to watch a rehearsal in his home. During the rehearsal break I conducted an impromptu all-American amaro tasting for the guys.
I recently had the chance to catch up with Hall to talk about the new landscape and change of routine being on a world tour in the age of Covid, some of his favorite drummers, cocktails and bars, and two big personal projects he’s working on, including a Christmas album collaboration with the Philadelphia Eagles.