“He’s in that in-between moment for an artist, when the work is done but he still doesn’t know what story to tell about it. The album has a name, but he doesn’t want to disclose that name just yet. He plays me a couple of tracks, nervously pacing, stepping outside the room, or picking the guitar back up to play along, like he’s still figuring out how the songs go. They’re big and bright and immediate—you can hear the rooms they were recorded in, picture exactly who they’re about. He asks me not to be more specific than that, so there you are: big and bright and immediate. The young, charming characters of old Vampire Weekend songs—witty, ironically detached, with expansive vocabularies and broken hearts—are here, but older and wiser and sadder. Like Koenig, they’ve lived a bit more life. “The people in ‘Oxford Comma’ and ‘White Sky’ and 'Step'—I had this feeling this is where those people are now,” he says. “Like, this is where all this shit ended up.“”
“The band’s new record will come out on Columbia later this year—pretty much every label, indie and major alike, made them an offer, Koenig says. And he, along with the rest of the band—remaining original members Chris Tomson and Chris Baio—will have to learn what it means to be in Vampire Weekend in 2019. Koenig recently had the liberating realization that it might actually be okay if the band aren’t quite as popular as they used to be: "On the last record, I had this slight feeling that we got a little bit too big.” Now, “sometimes people ask me, Are you nervous that you’ve been gone so long? And I might have been nervous three years ago, like, Am I gonna get all this shit together? Now I’m at this place where I’m kinda like, if the record wasn’t done and I wasn’t excited to go on tour, I might even wait longer. Not only did I stop stressing about the fact that it had taken so long, I started to be like, This makes sense. Why do people release music more than every five years?” He smiles and reaches over to the computer in the studio with the new record on it. He gave the final version to the label just the other day, he says.“You want to listen to a couple more?"“
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