Rebirth Of A Vampire
“This has been particularly idyllic,” Ezra Koenig says, gesturing around himself, and it is: sun-filled recording studio, windows letting in the Los Angeles light. It's in this room that Koenig has been working—slowly, quietly—on a new Vampire Weekend record. Also raising a baby, here in the city. Just…existing, really. “There's moments where I've thought to myself: It kind of doesn't get better than this,” he says. “Like, spend the morning with your family, then you come to work in a place like this, hang out, and then you go back to your family. And I fantasized for a second: I could give the record to like four people and then say, All right, let's start on the next one.” But then Koenig began thinking about the live shows the band might play. He started thinking about people hearing the new songs. Like you, he thought about Vampire Weekend coming back and got excited.
Subtitles throughout by Ezra Koenig.
He's got a guitar in his lap that he plucks occasionally, Polo track pants, and an expression of concentration. He's in that in-between moment for an artist, when the work is done but he still doesn't know what story to tell about it. The album has a name, but he doesn't want to disclose that name just yet, or at least, not publicly—in January, he’ll tease it on his Instagram, giving up the initials, if nothing else: FOTB. In the same post, he’ll reveal a little bit more about it: It's a double album of sorts. Singles—six in all, leading up to the album’s release three months from now—are on the way. The first two, "Harmony Hall" and "2021," came out this morning. So, finally, did the album title: Father of the Bride.
He plays me a couple of tracks, nervously pacing, stepping outside the room, or picking the guitar back up to play along, like he's still figuring out how the songs go. They're big and bright and immediate—you can hear the rooms they were recorded in, picture exactly who they're about. He asks me not to be more specific than that, so there you are: big and bright and immediate. The young, charming characters of old Vampire Weekend songs—witty, ironically detached, with expansive vocabularies and broken hearts—are here, but older and wiser and sadder. Like Koenig, they've lived a bit more life. “The people in ‘Oxford Comma’ and ‘White Sky’ and ‘Step’—I had this feeling this is where those people are now,” he says. “Like, this is where all this shit ended up.”
It's been nearly six years since the last Vampire Weekend record, Modern Vampires of the City, which was about death and the end of things, because that's what was on Koenig's mind at the time: “Being in your late 20s and being like, Life is crazy. I'm gonna die.” No one died. At worst Koenig was just exhausted, in retrospect—Modern Vampires was the band's third record in five years. “The typical quarter-life crisis,” Koenig says ruefully. “Like, What's the point of this, what do I have to say, do I really want to keep doing this?” The band had gone from cheerful and collegiate and preppy to weary and sad, and somehow their fans liked it even more. “It's incredibly easy to prove people wrong,” Koenig says of the third album's shifts in mood. “It's as simple as being like, Okay, here's a minor-key song.” Modern Vampires did all the things bands fronted by guys holding guitars aren't supposed to be able to do anymore. It was Vampire Weekend's second No. 1 album in a row. It won a Grammy. They toured the world off of it. And then Koenig just, well, went away. The band were finished with their contract with XL, the indie label that first signed them, and in search of a new label. Rostam Batmanglij, who'd produced the first three Vampire Weekend records and often served as Koenig's co-writer, left the band to pursue new projects of his own. (He is still in their orbit, though, and contributed to some songs on the new record.) Everyone was proud but exhausted. Their whole 20s had been spent on stages, basically. No one minded having a break.
In the aftermath, Koenig released Neo Yokio, a wry anime TV series for Netflix, which stars Jaden Smith as a clotheshorse bachelor magician and Jude Law as his murmuring robot butler. He wrote a demo with Diplo that became a hook on a Beyoncé album and went to Mexico to work on music for Kanye West—he and Dave Longstreth of Dirty Projectors, chopping it up over breakfast with Kim Kardashian. He let the urgency of Vampire Weekend, which had dictated almost everything in his adult life, fade a bit. And gradually, almost accidentally, he started spending most of his time in Los Angeles, where he and his partner, Rashida Jones, had a son this summer. “It still feels kind of surreal,” Koenig says. “Like, if I haven't seen him for a few hours and then I see him, I'm just like: Wow, I can't believe you're real.”
The band's new record will come out on Columbia—pretty much every label, indie and major alike, made them an offer, Koenig says. And he, along with the rest of the band—remaining original members Chris Tomson and Chris Baio—will have to learn what it means to be in Vampire Weekend in 2019. Koenig recently had the liberating realization that it might actually be okay if the band aren't quite as popular as they used to be: “On the last record, I had this slight feeling that we got a little bit too big.” Now, “sometimes people ask me, Are you nervous that you've been gone so long? And I might have been nervous three years ago, like, Am I gonna get all this shit together? Now I'm at this place where I'm kinda like, if the record wasn't done and I wasn't excited to go on tour, I might even wait longer. Not only did I stop stressing about the fact that it had taken so long, I started to be like, This makes sense. Why do people release music more than every five years?”
He smiles and reaches over to the computer in the studio with the new record on it.
“You want to listen to a couple more?”
Zach Baron is GQ's staff writer.
A version of this story originally appeared in the February 2019 issue with the title "Rebirth Of A Vampire."
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