Rostam Batmanglij was one of the original members of the New York band, Vampire Weekend. The group's career peaked after releasing its Grammy-winning third album, “Modern Vampires of the City,” in 2013.
But in January of this year, Rostam announced he would leave the band and go solo. And with that, he released the song, "EOS."
The Frame's John Horn spoke with Batmanglij about his solo career, his work as a producer, and how he's now comfortable singing about his sexuality.
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS:
Most of your professional music career has been through collaboration, whether it was with Vampire Weekend or your other band, Discovery, with Wesley Miles, the vocalist from Ra Ra Riot. You recently left Vampire Weekend and I wanted to ask why you decided to start a solo career now?
Well, the announcement to say that I was no longer a member of Vampire Weekend was something that was in the works for a long time. I knew that it was the right choice for me. I guess I just figured out that, throughout your 20s, you do things that you love. And now I'm 32, and you become a little bit more aware of what exactly is important to you.
I figured out that it was important for me to have my identity, just live independently and like being myself, musically. That sounds sort of pretentious.
No, I totally get it. It wasn't that you felt you had become your inauthentic self, but you were getting back to something that was a more clear representation of what you wanted to do.
Maybe, yeah. There are definitely some people who responded to my announcement in a negative way, which I really tried to frame positively. I was actually pretty shocked and disturbed when news outlets like Rolling Stone and Pitchfork summed up my statement as "quitting." The headline was, "Rostam quits Vampire Weekend." I wrote three paragraphs that I spent a lot of time figuring out what was the best way to talk about it, and I felt like I put my heart out there. And then it was reduced to the word, quit.
It upset me and I asked someone to reach out, and I think some of the headlines were changed. Maybe some of the headlines were not, but it felt very reductive to me. [laughs] Maybe there's no other way about it. I'm a pretty big fan of "House of Cards" and recently it was announced that Beau Willimon, who created the show...
...is leaving.
Exiting. So he got a great verb and I got stuck with quit.
Let's talk about the music. You recently released the track, "Gravity Don't Pull Me," and it feels like it's very much a song about a breakup that was present in your mind when you were writing the song. Can you talk about the inspiration behind the song and how you take things that have happened to you in real life and see them in a new way?
I think that's the only way I know how to write songs, is to think about my life, and also to think about the words at the same time. Usually, I am in my head thinking about the experiences in my life that led me to feel a certain way. So in the song "Gravity Don't Pull Me," there's references to a specific experience I had of running into someone that I was with and that I had not seen in like four or five years.
You've broken up and run into them.
Yeah, and that was kind of the feeling. There's that lyric: "A train under my feet, hurdling beneath me." I remember what street it was, it was Howard Street in New York, in SoHo. That was the feeling I had running into this person. It's like this idea of this enormous thing moving very quickly below you, so you can really touch it. You have to just allow it to pass underneath you. And that is the feeling sometimes that I've had with this person after breaking up.
But what you're describing is something that happens to you on a very personal level.
Yes.
And also, somebody whose had any kind of similar experience can listen to and understand. Is it important that you think about things that are, in some ways, universal? You are bringing a new understanding to your own life — you're working something out personally, and what it does musically can affect somebody in a similar way. Are you mindful of that?
Yes, I'm mindful. I'm somebody who thinks that all music is inherently political. So, for me as a person who identifies as gay of Iranian descent, I feel like to write a love song is inherently politically. It was important for me to not shy away or obscure those aspects of my identity in this song. I didn't set out to write a song where there was no ambiguity in regards to pronouns, with regards to my specific experience as a gay person.
When you're writing songs for yourself, as opposed to in a band, do you feel you have a greater ability to not have to worry about consensus?
Well in Vampire Weekend, the songwriting team was Ezra [Koenig] and I, and on the first two albums we collaborated more on lyrics. On the third album, the division was more me with music, Ezra with lyrics. That was important for that album because it is a very personal album to Ezra. I never felt like there were things I couldn't express lyrically in Vampire Weekend. I was always proud of everything that we wrote together. And we did tackle some gay themes as well, like on the song, "Diplomat's Son."
Could you talk about how that song came together?
Yeah, and it's a pretty interesting story. The song started with a short story Erza wrote and sent me when we were in college — so we were like 21 or something — and there was nothing gay about the short story he wrote. But in my head it led me down this path of imagining a gay romance at a boarding school, which is where the short story took place. I had this idea for this song and I just started it, and that was what came out. I wrote the chorus, I wrote a handful of the melodies in the song.
I remember the first time I played it for Ezra, he was like, "I like this" [laughs]. And in some ways we never really talked about what we individually felt the song was about. It was kind of like the unspoken joint venture in terms of perspective of a song.
But there is some speaking that you're doing in this, and I'm wondering what it feels like and if there was a moment where you felt liberated by the idea that you can sing as an artist about who you are as a gay man?
Yeah, I definitely felt that and I knew that when this song came out, it would effectively be my coming out. At that point, in 2009, I was not out in the press. I was out to friends and family, but I knew that I wanted to come out [publicly]. I knew that it was something that was important to me, and I knew that once "Diplomat's Son" came out, it would contextualize things differently.
Knowing that gave me the courage to talk about being gay in a profile that Rolling Stone did, which was written a handful of months before the album came out. But [the story] didn't come out until the album came out. So there was a period there where I had come out to a journalist...
...and it wasn't public.
[laughs] And I was just sort of hanging out there, waiting two or three months for the article to come out. So that was an interesting time.
On top of being in bands and writing solo music, you also produce a lot for other artists.
I should say that my role as a producer is something that's been a part of pretty much every recording I've been a part of, so in some ways I consider [producing] what I do primarily. I don't want to get into putting myself in a corner.
But I think what you do as a producer is interesting. You produced the track "Warm Blood" for Carly Rae Jepsen's latest album, "Emotion." It seems that Vampire Weekend and Carly Rae Jepsen wouldn't be on the same bill, so how does a collaboration like that come together?
Okay, I'm gonna try not to be negative, but I don't think of my own kind of music as different than Carly Rae Jepsen. I don't think of myself as someone who is part of the "indie music world," or as a person who was in a guitar band. I just want to set the record straight. But I will say that I was a really big fan of Carly Rae's previous album.
I thought there were so many great songs on it, and this was a rare instance where I reached out to my management and I said, "I heard Carly Rae Jepsen is around town writing songs with people. I'd love to meet her." The first time I ever met her, we started working on "Warm Blood." Over the course of seven months we wrote the song and just kept coming up with more parts. It was kind of this process...
That's sort of a long process, half a year.
I don't think that's long.
Do you like to work things for as long as you can?
I love writing songs over time. Sometimes I'll work on songs for like five years, and I'll be like, Okay, I think it's done now.
Do they get better over those five years?
Some friends tell me that they get worse [laughs], and I need to learn to listen to those friends. But "Warm Blood" was an example of a good amount of time to work on a song. So to answer your question, I guess in some ways, it came out just the way that I work with anyone: I imagine what would be an interesting context for their voice as an artist, and I think as a producer that's one of your roles. I like to make music that I can imagine them singing on and then I ask them to sing on it, and if something good comes out of that, then it's the start of a song.
You lived in New York and moved to Los Angeles about two years ago, how does the city itself start to inform what you're writing, how you're feeling and how that's reflected in the compositions that you're doing?
Well, to go back to working with Carly Rae Jepsen, just for her to come to my studio and for us to start the song the first time we ever met, that would have been maybe harder in New York, even though I always had a studio in whatever apartment I lived in. But now I have one that gets sunlight, it's more comfortable, a little bit more space for equipment, a little bit more space to turn the volume up. I think that's been a part of why Los Angeles has been surging culturally, because there's space to create, there's space to write songs, there's space to create art.
Now with your solo career, you're the one doing the main vocal work. How do you think it sounds and do you enjoy singing by yourself?
As someone who got up on stages and played instruments for eight years, and also sang harmonies and counter-melodies and backup vocals, the one thing that I have always never doubted is my own singing voice. My ability to play instruments — I think I have a lot of style when I play. But all throughout that period, I always felt like the one thing I feel like I could really do is sing.