Interview: Vampire Weekend

‘Oxford Comma’ won Best International Song at the Indiecision ’08 and by the sounds of their brilliant new album Contra, New York’s Vampire Weekend has a very good shot at a few noms in ’10. Rostam Batmanglij talked to Indiecision about the record, his love for Indian music and bonding with MIA.

Q. Was the success of your debut album a surprise? Did that affect in any way the way you approached Contra, knowing the burden of expectation on your sophomore release?
Well we worked really hard and took a great deal of time making our first record and we spent time touring behind it before it was even released so in that way we felt like we weren’t rushing into anything. It was a slow climb towards ‘success’ so it’s hard to perceive the end result as surprising. That said, it’s scary to think of what good stuff comes out and doesn’t go anywhere so we’re definitely grateful. Since we’d put a lot of the pressure on ourselves with the first record, before anyone had heard it, we could feel confident in our own abilities with the second one.

Q. A lot of our readers have asked this question – did you guys actually visit Dharamsala?
Ezra went there one summer with a friend. I think it was the summer of 2005.

Q. Why is the original version of ‘Campus’ called the ‘Bollywood mix’?
Well it was originally supposed to come out with another song – the second side of a 7” vinyl – that was called ‘Bollywood’ at the time. That song is something I’m still working on.

Q. Are there any Indian references on Contra?
Definitely. ‘Horchata’ starts with a drone of a fifth on a harmonium. ‘Giving Up the Gun’ breaks down into this kind of Indian/Brazilian hand drum pattern. What’s inspiring to me about Bollywood music is that it’s sort of omnivorous of every genre of music around the world, and also the way that it puts various rhythms and tempos right up against one other, that mentality inspired us in many ways.

Q. Is Contra a reference to the popular ’80s video game? What’s the story behind the title?
It’s a strange word in that it doesn’t really exist by itself in English. It has several connotations but used on its own, it’s ultimately something that’s both within and outside of the English language and I think was important to us.

Q. Can you describe the average Vampire Weekend songwriting session? How do ideas generally come up?
There really is no one way in which songs are written. We find that we end up working on them as the four of us in a rehearsal room, or Ezra and I will work together at a piano or in front of a computer.

Q. What experiences did you draw on from to write Contra? Thematically, what can listeners expect to hear about on the new album?
Conflict is a big part of it.

Q. What are the new instruments we’ll hear on Contra? Rostam, what’s special about the keyboard you bought on eBay?
Well you’ll hear a lot of synths that I basically used the computer to make from scratch. You’ll hear these Roland 909 handclaps (‘White Sky’/‘Taxi Cab’) and I pitch-shifted them really low. What’s interesting about those clap sounds is that they were completely synthesized – mathematically engineered, and yet they are supposed to represent the chaos of a bunch of people doing something pretty un-uniform: clapping. The keyboard I got on eBay is a Yamaha VSS-30. I sing a single note into its built-in microphone and then it maps that across the keyboard. Every vocal imperfection is amplified as you go up and down the scale; it’s a kind of unreliable narrator.

Q.You do some great covers in concert. Any remakes on the new record?
Nope. But there are some samples and musical references for sure. On ‘Diplomat’s Son’, I put a vocal sample from MIA in the background (it’s from the song ‘Hussel’), she’s basically scatting. It was cool that she cleared the sample. I met her once at Coachella a few years ago. She was rad. When I heard her music I felt connected to it on so many levels being the son of Iranian immigrants.

Q. What’s the newest thing on your iPod’s right now?
A song called ‘Da Style Deh’ by Busy Signal. It’s kind of Indo-Jamaican.

Q. Your picks for best album and best track of ’09? And while you’re at it, of the 2000s?
Yikes. I’ll say ‘Left and Right in the Dark’ by Julian Casablancas for best track of ’09 and for the 2000s, the best album was probably Kid A.

Stream Contra in it’s entirety on Vampire Weekend’s official website. Here’s the video for the first single ‘Cousins’.

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