Vampire Weekend on Fame, The Hype Machine and The Future
Featuring: Vampire Weekend
Written by: Justin Pearsall
Published: Feb 6th '08
By now you know the Vampire Weekend by-line: Blog born, NYC uni students whip up world-by-storm hype with Afro-pop sound supposedly modeled on Paul Simon’s Gracelandand Talking Heads’ Remain in Light-era.
The thing that often gets overlooked in all this prefatory info is that Vampire Weekend’s recently released debut album is musically brilliant, one of few true great debuts in the indie rock/pop scene in recent years. Talking with the band’s bassist, Chris Baio, from his New York apartment, Wireless Bollinger goes in-depth to examine the band’s formation, their future and how it feels to be in the middle of the hype machine.
WB: It must be really crazy right now with the album just about out.
CB: It’s going to really ramp up when the album comes out in America, but I’m just in my apartment for a bit now. We’re doing an in store in the city tonight and tomorrow we’re playing David Letterman, which I’m really psyched about, and then playing a show.
Did it seem to you like the band just exploded, or was the process more gradual from the inside?
Everything was pretty gradual, there was no moment of realisation where it was ‘oh my god, this is a big jump’. If there was any one thing that was encouraging early on it was when the New York Times reviewed a show of ours last summer, before we were signed and on tour.
Many have attributed your sudden success to the coverage of music blogs, do you think this is an accurate statement?
I think blogs have helped us as a band. We were able to do three full tours before we even had an album out thru word of mouth and the internet. Sometimes I think the blog effect can be a little overstated though, but it’s definitely something that helped us.
Before Vampire Weekend were you all in other bands?
I think we’d all had experience playing in other bands in the suburbs, then in college. Ezra [Koenig, vocalist] had a rap group that Christopher [Tomson], the drummer, was a backing musician in, and Rostam [Batmanglij], who plays keys and also produced our album, would also produce this band. I would play their music on their radio show and go to see them live.
Compared to these other bands, did you notice something special in the creation of Vampire Weekend?
I think we could tell pretty early on that a lot of people were coming to check us out. Our first two shows or so it was only our friends, then it would become friends of friends and people we didn’t know coming to our shows; it grew really quickly even in the first three or four performances, which isn’t that normal for a band you usually expect to be stuck for that early part, to go through this period of no one really caring. But for us it did feel special.
In an earlier interview Ezra said that Afro-pop was a sound that you strived for. How did this help define your sound?
I think there were certain things that we talked vaguely about incorporating and even more specifically about avoiding at the start. Afro-pop and certain guitar tones from African records were something that Ezra liked, and wanted to bring in.
I think that it’s something we strive for, but a lot of what we write is instinctive and feeding off each other, it’s a little bit of both.
In another interview it was stressed that Vampire Weekend is Afro-Rock more than Afro-pop. Is this distinction true?
I think it’s the other way around. When I think of 60s guitar pop, you could argue that the Beatles are pop or rock, I think the sort of pop elements of that period are more what we strive for. For a lot of rock bands in the last 10 years, rock has been characterised by a really heavy distorted guitar which is definitely something we were avoiding.
Anyway, I wouldn’t call us an Afro-pop band, I think we have elements of it, but that’s not how I would describe us.
How would you describe it?
I think once you get deeper than pop it gets hard. On some level there’s some punk, there’s some Afro-pop, some classical, some new wave. So, the umbrella of pop is best, it would be really disingenuous to call us Afro-pop because we’re not from Africa. While there is our approximation of African music in some of our songs, other songs are completely different. Anything else doesn’t apply to the whole album or even whole songs, I think.
One of the most pleasantly surprising things about your debut record is its continuity and consistency. Was that something the band consciously mapped out or was it more a process of choosing the best material available?
We had some other songs that we were playing at the very beginning of the band that we eventually abandoned because we didn’t see them fitting in with our goals on the album. We recorded over 18 months, some songs were written over a year, and I think we all felt it was important to make a proper defined album. So yes, there was a goal to make a really cohesive album.
Was the last 18 months of hype without a tangible product a frustrating experience?
It’s been frustrating on some level because people were evaluating us as a band on two or three mp3s when we had the majority of a full album recorded and written. And we did want to share it but the timing wasn’t right – I’m a year younger and was still in school, we couldn’t tour, we had the three guys working freelancing day jobs. It ended up being the best to put the album out now, but there was something frustrating in getting judged on those two or three songs.
A lot is said about your prior influences, do any of your contemporaries influence you?
I don’t know about influencing us, but we like the Dirty Projectors who we’ve toured with and Yacht. Some albums I liked last year included The National’s Boxer and Video from Sweden, but even then I think we sound completely different from all of them. I mean Dirty Projectors are definitely an influence in regards to African music, especially with Ezra being a part-time member of theirs over the summer.
The other Vampire Weekend catchcry for the international audience is your ‘NYC band’ status. Is the scene in NYC as interesting as we overseas believe it to be or is it a little mythologised?
That’s a good question, I think the same thing happens in England where there’s this imposed vision of esteem that all these bands are just friends when they were coming up together; that they all signed record deals together and they’re all friends, whereas I don’t think that’s necessarily the case.
There are always bands playing in New York which is a really good thing, it’s a really good musical city, but it’s also really spread out. It’s never as coherent as people make it out to be, it’s not like we were friends with all of these bands. But it’s a great place to come up, you get to play and meet them.
Do you have strong visions for the band’s future or is it now something that you rely upon management for?
We don’t have super expectations for this band, because when you set up these expectations you’re bound to fail in some way or disappoint yourself. I try and take everything day-by-day. At the same time we all try and stay involved, we had no one working for us as recently as June last year. I booked half of our first year on tour, Rostam produced our album and did the graphics and visuals. Since we were so involved in the beginning it helps us make informed decisions every step of the way; we are very involved.
I know it may seem crazy to talk about a follow-up, but are there any thoughts?
I know we’ve been sitting on these songs for more than a year and we’re itching to begin work on the new album. We’ll try and put out as much music that we believe in as possible.
A lot of the other mega-hyped bands in recent years have had trouble with critically successful follow-ups, is this something you’re wary of?
People ask if we felt pressure on the first one because people had already been writing about us long before it came out. We weren’t though, because we’d written the songs and they had mostly been recorded before anyone knew who we were.
I think there definitely will be an increased sense that we are under more of a microscope on the second album, at the same time you can’t let external pressure like that come too much into play because we got were we have by not worrying what others think and making the best music that we can. There will be an awareness of it, but I don’t think we’ll be struggling too much or over analysing it for the next album.
If there has been any consistent criticism of the debut it’s been that ‘Vampire Weekend sound too much a product of their influences’. How would you address this?
Anytime a new band comes up they are going to get pigeonholed as having one influence. Even if we’re too close to our influences, we’ve got 20 different influences and putting these together we’re really not that close to any one thing; it’s its own thing in a way.
What about some mainstream media who’ve suggested they can’t love anything that has blossomed so quickly?
That’s a reaction not to the music but to the word of mouth surrounding it, which shouldn’t be that relevant when you’re evaluating an album. One thing that can be a little frustrating is that so many pieces talk about the blogs and how fast things have happened, focusing on the things around the music, not the music itself.
Are there plans to tour internationally?
Right now it’s mostly the US and the UK, then it’ll be home for a couple of weeks and in May we’ll look to get up with the international touring. We’ll definitely do Aus and Japan over the US summer.
