A few months ago Harry Styles went to watch Luton Town. He was spotted on Match of the Day. Thrills all round. However, eagle-eyed viewers steeped in indie music spotted that Styles was only half the story. Because in front of him, speaking to Styles, was Ezra Koenig, the lead singer of Vampire Weekend.
It wasn’t the first meeting of the pair, who were guests of the Luton Town director and Sony boss Rob Stringer. “We’d met before,” Koenig says, at home in Los Angeles. “We had a nice chat in a sushi spot once.” Encounters such as this are not rare for Koenig, one of pop’s best-connected men. He has written for Beyoncé and Liam Gallagher and is married to the actress Rashida Jones, meaning the legendary producer Quincy Jones is his slightly intimidating father-in-law.
And tonight, the singer from New York is back in Luton with Vampire Weekend, for Radio 1’s Big Weekend. The band are enjoying a purple patch. Their fifth and finest album, Only God Was Above Us, was released last month to universal acclaim and they will be back in the UK touring in December. Such attention is quite a gear shift for Koenig, who turned 40 last month and has spent most of the five years since Vampire Weekend’s previous album hanging out with Jones and their son, who was born in 2018, occasionally popping to Japan to research traditional off-kilter vocal techniques.
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“It’s an adjustment,” he says, grinning. He talks at a considered, relaxed pace, and is dressed in a prim shirt and a cardigan. “My ideal schedule would be to finish a record, release it, take a year off. But I recognise that would be foolish.”
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Vampire Weekend, which also includes the bassist Chris Baio and the drummer Chris Tomson, came to fame in 2008 with the hits A-Punk and Oxford Comma (yes, the punctuation mark). Hailing from the Ivy League Columbia University, they were smart, preppy and ferociously tight when performing live. They had also, clearly, listened to Paul Simon but, over the years, early rhythmic clatter morphed into sophisticated, cerebral but still fun pop.
I wonder, though — five albums in 16 years. Does that lack of pace bother him? “I used to get stressed about it,” he says. “I’d think I should go and sit at the piano for three hours. But in any career, when younger, the number one thing you think about is whether you made the right choice. ‘Should I have gone to law school?’ But as I got older and had a family, I realised that a day in which we have a breakthrough in a studio is just as good as a day when I take my son to school.”
But what of the other issue for a wealthy, ageing rock star: comfort? Frankly, Koenig’s life is enviable. He lives with his family in California and creates an album every four years. Is he concerned what he might write about in the future? “No, I don’t worry about getting too comfortable in this world — full of one problem after another,” he says. “I have the opposite fear anyway, which is forcing out music that I don’t believe in, out of greed. That’s the worst thing that can happen to you in showbusiness, to do something you don’t believe in.”
I mention Jerusalem, New York, Berlin, his 2019 song that is, quite possibly, the first to refer to the Balfour Declaration of 1917 that backed the “establishment in Palestine of a national home for Jewish people”. One line in the song is: “An endless conversation, Since 1917.” Koenig is Jewish and, not surprisingly, the band have not been rehearsing the song for the upcoming tour — not that he thinks the track should be contentious.
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“I read some interpretations that framed that song as my anxiety about rising antisemitism — my fear somebody was going to genocide me,” Koenig says. “Not quite. To me, that song is about the tragedy of human nature, and how anger turns into something incredibly dangerous. It was certainly not about taking a side, or me saying as a Jewish person that I’m worried what happens to Jewish people. That situation [in Gaza] is, above all, tragic and will hopefully stop very soon.”
When I tell him another reading online says “he is entreating his fellow Jews to let the Palestinians have land” he smiles wryly. “Songs are songs — politics is politics. And if you want to make a bold political statement, you don’t need the vagueness of the little poems we write — go make a speech.”
Koenig was born in New York City in 1984. His father, Robin, was a set dresser on films and TV programmes and his mother, Bobby, a psychotherapist. On a blog called Internet Vibes that he wrote at Columbia, Koenig described them as “middle-class post-hippies with a propensity to put on eastern European accents and use obscure Yiddish phrases”. They left New York soon after his birth and settled in New Jersey. He went to an ordinary comprehensive school, despite what many believed when Vampire Weekend broke through, mostly because the singer is well-spoken and went to an Ivy League university. His family tree is, in fact, a classic American immigrant story with ancestors dotted around eastern Europe.
“It’s an archetypal journey we’ve seen many times,” Koenig says. “The first generation American plies a trade, working, working. Then the next has a boldness to accomplish something bigger. And, then, the generation after that just spends time getting into fights on the internet.”
Koenig is one of life’s observers, a pop philosopher who uses his specificity to speak to universal truths. He is evolving too. He is looking towards spirituality (“I wish there was a cooler word!”) and “the eternal” to explain life’s ups and downs. As they utter in the Serenity Prayer, often said at Alcoholics Anonymous, to “accept the things you cannot change”. He used to, like a lot of people his age, feel “bitterness and pessimism”, describing his young self as a “hyper-rational atheistic materialist”. He would write songs, like Ya Hey, from the 2013 album Modern Vampires of the City, that came at religion in a “it doesn’t make sense vibe”. But that has changed.
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“Hopefully, you can start to realise the pitfalls of your own world view,” Koenig says. “Which, maybe, doesn’t always provide comfort in difficult times. I used to ask how can there be a God if the world is so f***ed up? But there is a brattiness there and I identify less with the brattiness now, more with the longing.”
This is, of course, age and reviews of Only God Was Above Us often mentioned Koenig’s landmark birthday — his songs becoming the soundtrack for growing old, especially for anyone who first listened to Vampire Weekend in their twenties. This chronicling is something Koenig will stick with, even if he “recognises that the path to meaningful work is narrow in your forties, fifties and sixties” for a songwriter.
“I’m hyper-aware how many bands wrote their best songs in their twenties and thirties,” he says. “But I have to believe that if I create something meaningful to me, it will resonate for someone else.
“But, also, I understand that people get older, have demanding jobs, kids, health problems. It’s not hard to understand why, when you are 15, you consume 100 albums in a year and when you’re 40 you may engage with, what, three? But when I picture that geriatric millennial fan, engaging with three albums, and we happen to be one of them? That’s as good as it gets.”
Radio 1’s Big Weekend is at Stockwood Park, Luton, with live broadcasts on Radio 1 and iPlayer
