One world is ending but a new one's always beginning
Ezra Koenig on the journey out of pessimism, swag secrets of the new Vampire Weekend album, copping Yohji and Margaret Howell bangers & more
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— Jonah & Erin
Vampire Weekend — they’re one of our favorite bands, with an all-bangers, brick-free discography. Founded in NYC in the late 2000s by Columbia homies Ezra Koenig, Chris Baio, Chris Tomson, and Rostam Batmanglij (who dipped in 2016), they’re about to release their fifth studio album, Only God Was Above Us, produced once again by “Sonic Sauce Wizard” and vintage Gap sweatshirt enthusiast Ariel Rechtshaid.
Erin and I have been bumping OGWAU at HQ for the past several weeks. We are happy to report not only that the “no bricks” streak is unbroken, but also that some catalog-best VW songs are in the mix. We’re f**king especially heavy with “Capricorn,” “Gen-X Cops,” “Mary Boone,” and “Pravda,” whose lyrics nod to Ghostface Killa’s “Winter Warz” — a deep-cut Wu-Tang slapper that (I) Jonah heard for the first time in the end credits to the Wayans Brothers’s classic Don’t Be A Menace II South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood.
What’s more?? Ezra is a longtime Spyfriend — he came through for one of the very first BBSP Interviews — and in addition to being a certified Deep Thinker, co-host of the delightful internet radio show Time Crisis, and creator of the cult-hit anime homage Neo Yokio, he is also a Vibey Talisman Amasser.
So I was psyched to tap in with Ezra the other day to talk about making Only God Was Above Us; hitting a style Crossroads and copping vintage Yohji and outlet-mall Margaret Howell slappers in Japan; multi-generational cop behavior; a sick London bookstore tote that people are sleeping on (it ain’t the Daunt Books one baby!!); and a clutch of special cherished objets that connect to the new album in different ways.
Blackbird Spyplane: A while back I remember you telling me you plotted every Vampire Weekend album on a four-quadrant grid — one axis was PREPPY and HIPPIE and the other axis was GORP and GOTH. Remind me what that was about…?
Ezra Koenig: “Oh yeah, I made this grid after Father of the Bride, when I was just starting to think about the new album. I don’t know if I nailed it, but it was a way of thinking. I have it in my notes, one sec, I’ll send you a picture (top below)...
“I haven’t thought about this in a while. I probably gotta kick the tires on it again — and I rewrote it later (bottom above), because I thought GORP was maybe making it confusing, so it became ‘goth vs. sunshine.’ But yeah, the idea was that the first two albums are Preppy-GORP — you know, I was wearing duck boots in the first-album era, there was a kind of sunshiney, feel-good quality. Then Modern Vampires of the City was Preppy-Goth. And Father of the Bride was Hippie-GORP. So I was thinking maybe this new album would be Hippie-Goth. [Laughs]
“It’s not exact, I need to keep working on this. But I like to create these rubrics. This type of thing is my Oblique Strategies.”
Blackbird Spyplane: This was a kind of creative exercise.
Ezra Koenig: “Yeah, with every album, there’s always a thought experiment — a way of figuring out A) where has the band been? and B) what feels like fresh territory? Because when you look at some of the all-time great discographies, what you tend to find is huge variation and beautiful continuity. And that’s really tricky, because those are opposing forces.”
Blackbird Spyplane: There’s two songs on the new album, “Gen-X Cops” and “Prep-School Gangsters,” which both connect to vibey ‘90s-era artifacts: a 1999 action movie whose VHS cover I remember seeing at video-rental spots, and a legendary 1996 New York magazine cover story about wealthy Upper Manhattan drug-dealing teenagers by Nancy Jo Sales.”
Ezra Koenig: “Yeah, I keep a running list of words and phrases I find interesting, which tends to come in handy when you’re starting work on a song. These are two phrases I’d written down somewhere along the way. I remember Gen-X Cops because, like a lot of ‘90s kids, I had a soft spot for Hong Kong action movies. Same with ‘Prep-School Gangsters.’ That New York cover is very famous to a certain type of person: You know, I was born in Manhattan, grew up in Northern New Jersey, and that picture, the blurry North Faces, really takes me back to East Coast winter.”
Blackbird Spyplane: The article is wild. I’ll link a PDF below for anyone who hasn’t read it. It also doubles as a ridiculous circa-‘90s slang dictionary. The kids call their customers custies, which I really like.
Ezra Koenig: “Custies is good, haha. So these phrases ‘Gen-X Cops’ and ‘Prep-School Gangsters’ were both on my list, and I eventually saw how they were in a kind of dialogue with each other — they both have the same number of words, a hyphen, cops and gangsters, and they both took me back to growing up. They were also just rich phrases, and I started to think about, OK, once they’re divorced from their contexts, what could they mean? I wanted to think about prep-school gangsters not just in terms of a Dalton kid who wants to deal drugs, but also as a character we encounter over and over through life.”
Blackbird Spyplane: On “Gen-X Cops” there’s a lyric about how “each generation makes its own apology.” That makes me think of a flipside, which is that every generation has its own “cop” behavior — norms and mores that people feel passionate about policing.
Ezra Koenig: “I don’t think I could put it any better than that.”
Blackbird Spyplane: On the theme of Old New York, your dad worked as a set decorator and set dresser on a bunch of NYC movies. Tell me about this United Scenic Artists t-shirt (above) he designed in the ‘80s…
Ezra Koenig: “I don’t know if this was in middle of union negotiations, but I think there was a moment in the ‘80s when two big unions came together, and my dad had this idea for a t-shirt design, possibly taken from an R. Crumb drawing. I used to wear it as a teenager — it’s on an old Canal Jeans blank, and it has this nice wide fit. I found it again recently, and I happened to find his old Smith’s painter’s pants, too, spattered with ancient paint stains. I like to pair the tee with the pants, partially when I feel like wearing all white, but it’s also nice to have clothes with family history and some mileage on them.”
Blackbird Spyplane: The other night Erin and I watched Jonathan Glazer’s Birth on Criterion — a great New York City movie with Nicole Kidman, very cool and unsettling s**t. Afterwards we were watching the credits, “C.R.E.D.I.T.S. Mindset” style, and we were stoked to see your dad’s name. Do you see a connection between the kind of world building you like to do with each album and your dad’s career?
Ezra Koenig: “They actually shot some of Birth on campus at Columbia when I was there, so I ran into him working on it. The thing about my dad is, he’s not an art director. He builds stuff in a very real sense. Sometimes it’s keeping track of props, sometimes it’s moving furniture around. He did a couple days on Martin Scorsese’s After Hours and had to make it seem like it was raining. Another story I loved was that he installed the glass in Al Pacino’s office in Carlito’s Way — the window looking down onto the club. That’s the kind of stuff he’d do. But I remember he worked on one of the Spider-man movies, and when I visited him on set, I found him taking out the garbage. He was like, ‘See, I’m a garbage man, too.’”
Blackbird Spyplane: You sent a pic of your copy of Sandhogs, by Gina LeVay, which documents the ongoing construction of Water Tunnel No. 3 under NYC, which started in 1954 — also known as “the greatest non-defense construction project in the history of Western Civilization.” There’s a lot of tunnel imagery on the new album, including a Tunnel No. 3 shout out on “The Surfer.” What’s the significance?
Ezra Koenig: “Underground imagery was a big part of this album — long before Lana Del Rey’s There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd or the news of the Jewish tunnels in Crown Heights hit the streets, I should say. This book’s from 2008, and it’s out of print, but it has all these beautiful, eerie images. I was looking for a copy for a long time, and finally got a signed one as a ‘finishing the album’ gift to myself. I’d been interested in the Sandhogs for a while. Before my father worked as a set dresser he actually inspected subway tunnels for the city, and he’d tell me about being a mile under Manhattan, meeting Sandhogs down there. And of course there’s a great article by your boy David Grann about the building of Water Tunnel No. 3.
Blackbird Spyplane: Yes, peace to Spyfriend David Grann, who we named “The G.O.A.T. of Astonishing Tales” — I’ll link to that article below along with “Prep-School Gangsters.” Yeah, it’s insane how close New York’s water supply is to total catastrophe. And David wrote that article 20 years ago.
Ezra Koenig: “Right, they have to finish this new tunnel ASAP because the other tunnels could fail at any moment, and hundreds of thousands of people could die. It’s dire.”
Blackbird Spyplane: Thinking of these massive, miraculous old tunnels, now on the brink of catastrophic failure, is there an aspect of “our glory days are behind us” / “our civilization is washed” when it comes to your interest in Tunnel 3? And is that a theme on this album generally?
Ezra Koenig: “That sentiment’s obviously prevalent in our culture right now. Maybe I’m a contrarian, but I feel more optimistic than ever. Not because I feel confident predicting what will happen in my life, in human history, in American history, but as I get older, you come to have some sense that optimism is a feeling that you can invoke and live in, in spite of your circumstances. At any given moment, one world is ending and a new world is beginning, and you always have a choice of how you want to frame things. Even unpleasant things.”
Blackbird Spyplane: That makes me think of the lead single, “Capricorn,” which is of course named for the astrological sign that straddles the year that’s ending and the year that’s beginning.
Ezra Koenig: “Absolutely. And this wasn’t my intention — a lot of ideas for sequencing came from other people in the band — but looking at the track list right now, I could frame this album as being about the journey out of pessimism. It starts with a cluster of songs that have a degree of anxiety, or complaint, or questioning to them, and then there’s a shift halfway through with ‘The Surfer,’ and we end on ‘Hope.’
“So I hear what you’re saying and I guess at certain hours of the day I might sit in that pessimistic ‘It’s all over’ feeling. But for me, when I picture the engineering feat of this tunnel, even though it’s not done and even though they’ve pushed and pushed the deadline, there’s a quote in the Grann piece where someone calls it ‘a great cathedral that almost nobody will ever see.’ If you had a dream about an underground cathedral and talked to a Jungian analyst, there’s a school of thought that says when we dream about finding new rooms or opening up tunnels or finding new levels below a house, it’s because our consciousness is expanding.
“It might be cheesy but my New Age side would say, ‘a cathedral almost no one will ever see?’ What’s that? Well, maybe that’s a well-regulated nervous system and an inner life. Maybe that’s the metaphor. We should all be so lucky to have a cathedral that no one will see.”
Blackbird Spyplane: All right, let’s go out on clothes. You sent a pic of two ‘90s-era Yohji Yamamoto jackets and a sportcoat from Margaret Howell. I was actually with you at the vintage shop in Tokyo when you copped the Yohjis, that place rocked.
Ezra Koenig: “Yeah, so these are less connected to the album and more about where I’m at fashion-wise these days. In the middle of making this album, me and the family lived in Japan for 6 months, and these jackets are my prized possessions from that time. At some point Ariel came out and we recorded some of the new album there, but a lot of the time I was just chilling — and yeah, I was with you when I found these early ‘90s Yohji suits.”
Blackbird Spyplane: For less than $400 each, mamma mia.
Ezra Koenig: “In amazing condition. Being over there I got more interested in vintage Yohji. When another friend was visiting we actually popped into one of the bigger Yohji shops, on Omotesando, and we were shocked to see Yohji himself there at a table in the back, hanging out. He had amazing style, and he had this giant white dog with him. Rashida and I were starstruck, but our son had a moment with him: Yohji came over and said, Do you like dogs? We were, like, Now we can tell him when he’s grown up, ‘You met Yohji Yamamoto and his dog.’”
Blackbird Spyplane: What do these jackets say about where you’re at stylewise?
Ezra Koenig: “Like a lot of people approaching 40, I felt like I was at a crossroads. If you asked me when I was younger how I’d dress when I was older, I’d have probably said, ‘I love preppy stuff, I like formality, I like suits and ties, I’m gonna lean harder and harder into that.’ And here I am and I can’t stand suits and ties. I realized there’s more Adam Sandler in me than I thought. But at the same time, I found myself aging out of a certain ‘graphic tee and street wear’ kind of thing, so I realized that I like sportcoats and suits if they’re funky enough, and I have to wear a tee shirt or a polo shirt underneath, and then it feels right.
“The Margaret Howell jacket was a major Japan find, too. We went to the Gotemba outlets, which is kind of like the Woodbury Commons of Tokyo — you have incredible views of Mt. Fuji, and designers you’re not gonna see at other outlets. Finding this perfect-fitting green Harris tweed sportcoat, with these big pockets, I felt like, This is what I’m supposed to be wearing. So these blazers run the gamut. The Howell is everyday wearable. The orangey striped one is great for some event I don’t wanna go to but can still feel like myself and not have to wear a dorky suit. And the one on the left is the most elusive — Rashida says it looks like someone would wear it in the ‘King of Wishful Thinking’ video — pure 1990. It came with green pants, so it’s a whole look.”
Blackbird Spyplane: Haha, she’s not wrong about the big ‘90s colorblock energy, but it’s so good. I’m kinda kicking myself for not trying this s**t on at the shop before you did.
Ezra Koenig: “It brings me a lot of happiness. I’ve been experimenting with ways to pull it off. That’s where I’m at — trying to figure out blazers that have a little life in them, but how to dress them down so I don’t feel like a Little Gentleman.”
Only God Was Above Us is ill and comes out Friday, April 5. Vampire Weekend kicks off a North American tour a few days later in Austin, TX, during the Total Solar Eclipse. The band is on IG here. Nancy Jo Sales’s “Prep-School Gangsters” article is here, and David Grann’s “City of Water” is here.
The SpyTalk Chat Room, where Spyfriends trade elite intel, is here.
The B.L.I.S.S. List — a comprehensive index of Beautiful Life-Improving Spyplane Staples — is here.
Enjoy our list of the world’s 35 slappiest shops, where Spyfriends have added a ton of gems in the comments.