Vampire Weekend Discuss Contra, How They Knew When They "Made It"

CHARTattack had the chance to sit down with Ezra Koenig, vocalist and guitarist for New York-based Vampire Weekend at the Soho Metropolitan hotel in downtown Toronto back in October 2009 before the onset of this unwelcome winter wonderland.

Over chamomile tea (Ezra) and a club soda (me), Koenig mused on a variety of topics from the concept of vacations and time off to the puzzling derision of the band because of their educational background to the creation of their sophomore effort, Contra, a record that heralds a more refined and thoughtful Vampire Weekend.

Here is that conversation in full:

CHARTattack: How have things changed for you guys since you released the first album?
Ezra Koenig: Well, I guess in some really basic ways more people know who we are, we actually have fans, but for the most part in terms of our day-to-day life, very little has changed.

We recorded this album almost exactly the same way that we recorded the first album, kind of by ourselves. We did a lot of it in the same studio.

I guess one difference, whereas on the first album we recorded the drums in our friend's basement, on this album we went and spent two days recording the drums at this really nice studio in Manhattan called Avatar. That wasn't because we felt like we should spend more money on this record, but really we felt like we wanted a room that was better suited for drums. It was little things like that.

Outside of that, in terms of the internal functioning of the band and our creative process, almost nothing has changed.

That has to be a bit comforting. Did you guys have to work at that at all?
Our label puts no pressure on us, so we just have to make choices that would make us feel comfortable.

So if we told our label that we would like to go to L.A. and record this album entirely in L.A. and we want to work with I don't know... the guy who produced the last Weezer album, which I think was Rick Rubin — wait, that might be a bad example. I don't think you can just call him up.

But if we had wanted a top modern rock producer, we probably could have made that happen. But ultimately we realized that it was nice to be at home. I think it was good that we did it the same way. We felt that we had enough fresh ideas in our head. We didn't need new collaborators coming in.

It's hard to compare the two records, but to me Vampire Weekend was more of a party record, but with Contra it seems a little more introspective. I don't know if that's accurate, but maybe you can shed some light on that?
I do think it's accurate. I think the first album is still introspective but this one is more overtly introspective, which sounds like a paradox, but it's more obvious that it's introspective.

I also didn't even realize, I remember after touring behind the first album people would say, "I really like your record, all of the songs are really up tempo and fast." It almost didn't dawn on us because we love all sorts of music, so on this album, well we didn't have to make too many choices because these are the songs we ended up with.

One thing is for sure, the fact that these were two ballads that we had written that we wanted to record we certainly didn't stop and say, "Well, hold on, we're a band known for up-tempo music, this won't work." I feel like ultimately those songs fit right in with the other ones, even if they are pretty different. There's a lot of sounds on this album and I think that the stuff that may take people back the most will be the slow, quiet songs.

With the ballads you're talking about "Taxi Cab" and "I Think Ur A Contra?"
Yeah.

You seem to have pushed yourself vocally on this record, especially with songs like "I Think Ur A Contra." Was that something you set out to do at the start of the process, or did it naturally come out?
I think I've always pushed myself vocally in the sense that sometimes we write a song and at first it might be out of my range or difficult to sing so I just try to figure out how to make it work.

With "I Think Ur A Contra" it's very high and quiet, so to sing the song I had to do it in kind of a quiet falsetto. It just kind of made sense for it.

The song kind of dictates how I sing and usually the song comes first. It's not like I step up to the mic and just start vocalizing. So yeah, I think that because we were making these ballads it made sense to sing differently. Even on those two ballads, I'm doing two very different things: I'm singing at the bottom of my range and arguably the top. So it just kind of comes out like that, I guess.

The record is a lot more rhythmically complex, there's a lot of layers to what you guys are doing, even more so than before. Can you speak to that? How do you feel about all the added texture?
That's also been very natural. We just added the things that served the songs, but you're right. Even on the first album we were always interested in the connection between rhythms and I think that like anybody, the more you listen to music around the world, usually your reaction isn't, "Wow, it's big world. Everything is so different." A lot of times you see the connections, you see where the roots of American music come from, you see how American music is influenced by African pop music, and how that's influenced Jamaican music and you kind of look at things more as a continuum that things flow through.

So, yeah, I think that there are so many genres of music that are defined by rhythms that it can be very illuminating to think about rhythmic connections. On this record so much music is defined by the sound of the drums that we certainly weren't going to limit ourselves to a traditional rock drum set. So if we felt that something would sound better with an 808 bass drum we would put it in. It doesn't mean that we're making a Run DMC song, but that the sound worked. If we thought that something would benefit from Brazilian percussion we brought it in.

Again, the goal is not to impersonate any other type of music but hopefully come up with something new. One thing that I'm happy about, I think that on the first album we had songs that people could easily reduce, like "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa" — that's an African song — even though to me I thought we were doing our own thing, but all of the songs on this album, there's a lot more layering and lot more going on so I'm sure some people are going to hear "Horchata" and say "This is more Afro-pop," but it's not, it's a mixture of a lot of different things and hopefully something new.

People like to categorize music because it's an easy way to understand it, but with this record I don't even know how to categorize it.
We wanted to make it sound like Vampire Weekend and not let any element of the song overshadow what we're doing. Which for some people happened on the first album. For example, "California English" has Auto-Tune, but I refuse to let that be "the Auto-Tune song" because Auto-Tune is just one of a lot of textures that's going on there.

It's not really that prominent.
A lot of people, when we first played it for them asked, "Was there some kind of effect on that?" I didn't want to tell them it's Auto-Tune because Auto-Tune used to just be a music nerd technical term and now with a lot of people it means T-Pain or Drake or whatever and Kanye. I like all that music, but I don't think "California English" sounds anything like that.

In the promo material sent out with the record there's a quote from Chris Tomson [drummer] where he says "I think that we sound more like Vampire Weekend than on the first record." Do you agree with that?
I do, and I think that relates to what we were just talking about. First of all, when you only have one album all people can do is compare you to other things. When you put out more music you have the chance to broaden the definition of who you are.

Sometimes people put out an [second] album that sounds exactly the same, which is fine. We always felt that the first album — we're very proud of it, but it didn't necessarily reflect all of our interests or all of our ideas. The more albums we put out the closer we'll get to defining it. I imagine by the third or fourth album people will maybe continue to understand who we are better.

And also, when we were talking about influences before, I do feel strongly that on this album there is no sound or influence that outweighs what we're doing, and I would like to think that even more so than on the first album we just integrated the things we love, maybe even more fully into what we want to do. I think there's plenty of African-inspired guitar on this album, but on the songs that we use it, it's not quite as easy for people to label it as genre exploration or something. There's just too many other elements.

You recorded in Mexico. Is that the only time you guys recorded outside of New York?
Yeah, except we made the song "Ottoman" for a movie soundtrack [Nick And Norah's Infinite Playlist] and I recorded the vocals in L.A., but that was kind of a weird exception.

So was it weird to remove yourselves from that known element in New York?
We were going down to be on tour and we knew we'd have some days off between shows, so it made sense to use that time to record because that tour came right in the middle of the recording process. It was very pleasant. It was a very beautiful studio and the people we worked with were very nice. It had a nice courtyard with a palm tree and a ping pong table, but it's a little hard to say that... hmmm... it was a great trip. I think it refreshed us and prepared us and certainly is part of the story of making the album, but I'm hesitant to draw any connections that are too great.

How many songs did you record in Mexico?
We mostly focused on "Cousins."

I wanted to ask about your lyrics. I'm hesitant to label them more serious, but with something like the chorus of "Holiday" — "If I wait for a holiday, could it stop my fear?" What is the fear that you're talking about?
I guess with that song... I don't know... [chuckling to himself]. Being a touring musician or being in any profession that involves traveling, it fundamentally changes the way you think about vacation time. Some people would argue that you're on a permanent vacation, but it can also be something that you never get a vacation from. The idea of leaving home ceases to be fun or exotic.

I think about my parents who work all the time and have to really carve out any time for themselves. Or even when I was working, too, it can be very difficult. Especially living in America, you're always meeting people from other countries. I can't really characterize Canada, but I know the people that work at our record label in places like France get way more vacation. It almost seems like they put more cultural stock in the idea of time off.

Thinking of the idea of working all year and getting just two weeks off, are you refreshing yourself or are you caught in this eternal loop of doing things you don't really want to do?

Its funny because you write the lyrics and then providing a succinct meta-commentary on it becomes very difficult. I don't know, I think that I'm just interested in talking about vacation as a concept, it's something I talk about on the first album, and I know people love to criticize our lyrics for being very bourgeois and what can be more bourgeois than going on vacation, but I actually don't think that's true.

In America almost the harder you work and the harder that you have it during the year, the more that you try to carve out your time to do whatever — even if it is just taking the subway to the beach. If you're living your life at various extremes, can one compensate for the other I guess?

Since you kind of touched on it, initially you guys took a lot of flak because one, you're educated, and two because your lyrics are somewhat literary. How do you react to that? Do people still try and throw that at you?
I think that people will always try and throw that at us because not everybody likes to think about things and people love to turn somebody else into a villain. It can certainly alleviate a lot of middle class guilt to pretend that other people have it so much easier than you, because being middle class in America or Canada is fairly comfortable. Relative to someone like Paris Hilton. Now she's really got it made [quietly laughing].

There are historical reasons why people link education and class, but they shouldn't be linked is the thing. Certainly in my family, there were many generations, especially when they first came to America, some of them went to very good colleges and were well-educated, but a lot of those people still moved back to New York City and had jobs like teachers and lived in city housing and stuff. So I've never thought of being well-educated meaning that you have a lot of money. In fact, a lot of the people I look up to and the people I grew up around, my parents included, were well-educated but didn't necessarily translate that into a ton of financial success.

In some ways, it's nice to think that even if your family doesn't have a ton of money you can still grow up around books and conversation. It's really fucked up when those things become mutually exclusive, I think anyway. Because people hear Columbia University [where Vampire Weekend formed] and they're like "Oh, my God," and of course a lot of rich kids do go to Columbia, but a lot of rich kids go to any college, but also people get financial aid.

I got financial aid to go to Columbia, and I graduated with a ton of loans, but again, for me to pretend that I had it hard is a little ridiculous. I had it harder than somebody that had no loans, but I grew up middle class and I went to Columbia, so I did okay.

I think it's important to break down those links. A byproduct of that is people say, "Yeah, well you called a song 'Oxford Comma.' You're some kind of elitist." I've said this many times, but to me that song is about anti-elitism and it's pretty fucked up that you get to the point where just because you know an article of grammar or know a certain word it means that you're somehow part of the military-industrial complex.

In an ideal world, you'll know whatever you want to know and you'll have access to whatever information you want access to no matter where you went to school and no matter how much money your family has. I'm very hesitant to judge people based on where they went to school. There are elitists at Columbia and I feel as disconnected from them as anybody else.

You guys have a song in the new Guitar Hero and songs popping up on TV shows and commercials, how do you feel about that?
Mostly, I feel like it's a triumph. Maybe in another era we'd be concerned about selling out or buying into a system.

Listen, let's start with Guitar Hero. People often ask us, "When did you start to feel like you'd made it?" I don't know if I ever felt like that. I'm thankful for our success, but I never had a moment where I felt like "Wow!" until I first played "A-Punk" on Guitar Hero. Then I felt like, "This is great!" I really felt like we had made it.

No matter what happens in the future, we have a song in Guitar Hero. Even just to play on that plastic Guitar Hero thing felt great. Just imagining that kids would be playing that song for fun, that's a great feeling. If people want to pay for our songs to be in a movie trailer or a commercial as long as we aren't asked to support a company we're ethically against, it's basically like free advertising. I'm glad that corporations are spending some of their money on new music.

Sometimes it feels like the whole world is reading music blogs on the Internet, but in reality it's such a small audience. I'm glad that people can trade our MP3s and get it out that way, but the reality is there are a lot of people that won't have heard of your band until they see a commercial or play Guitar Hero.

There was a huge barrage of press before your first record. I remember being on a plane to Vegas and picking up the issue of Spin with you guys on the cover and doing an interview well before the record had come out. Do you feel more prepared this time around?
I think we are prepared. In both instances, we made the record by ourselves. Before we had any attention at all we had made an entire album by ourselves, even before a single record label had talked to us, I'm getting ahead of myself, we hadn't recorded "I Stand Corrected" or "M79" so we had recorded 9 out of 11 anyway. We just felt confident that we knew what we were doing. I never took it for granted that people were gonna like us, that was the icing on the cake. Again, with this album, I feel that we've made the best album that we possibly could and we can be proud of it.

I do feel prepared for whatever is ahead. I don't know if it will match the success of the first record. I do know we have fans that are really psyched to hear it and there are gonna be people that love it and of course there are going to be people that talk so much shit about it, but that's kind of a nice thing about this day and age — you're prepared for backlash from the minute you start.

Somebody was asking me that before, "Were you prepared for the backlash that came around March, April [after the self-titled debut release]?" I was like "The backlash did not come around March or April it started the second people started writing about our band."

Hype and backlash are the same thing, they exist side-by-side. There are no surprises there. Your surprise might come the first time a blog writes about you, but after that initial shock that there are gonna be some people out there that don't fully embrace what you're doing then nothing is shocking. Certainly before the first album even came out, there were people saying, "This band is going nowhere." Obviously, we've weathered the storm.

I'm certainly not going to say that we have the power to convert any naysayers, but that's probably for the best. I can't pretend that I like everything. I mean, I try to [laughing really hard now], so it's alright.

Going into the release of Contra, I feel that we've made the best album that we can and the outcome is gonna be good enough. We're already getting a good response from some of our fans and that's all you can ask for.