For a guy who sings with a band whose last two albums went to No. 1, Ezra Koenig is comfortably anonymous in his neighborhood. Walking from his Lower East Side apartment to a nearby café, only one passerby seems to slip into an “I know that guy from somewhere” expression. Koenig orders a cafe Americano and talks about the crossroads he and the rest of Vampire Weekend were at before releasing their critically acclaimed "Modern Vampires of the City" album in May.

The new album is — I hesitate to say this — more mature. Was it a goal to have it be more mature? That always seems to have a negative connotation in music.

Well, for me it was kind of an anti-goal. I was scared of making music that was too mature. And not because I think that there’s anything wrong with your tastes changing or your outlook changing as you get older, but the idea of making a mature album connotes all kinds of whack things to me. There are just very few people that I think have gotten more mature and better, so it’s almost like you don’t want to think about maturity or anything like that. You just want to keep doing what you’re doing.

Sometimes we had to fight to find the middle ground. At least one of my favorite songs that we worked on in the recording process was another kind of slow piano ballad, and it was cool and it had a lot going for it, but if that had been on the album it would have been one too many slow songs. … And it’s not because I don’t enjoy slow songs, but you have to challenge yourself to find the energy and excitement. You can express the same idea in a number of different ways. And I think a great album has variety anyways. I think we had to make sure there were still some punky, energetic songs on there.

It definitely does feel like an album, in the sense that there’s a cohesive running order, the songs segue into one another smoothly, and there are a lot of recurring themes. In this day of the $1.29 single, how important is it to you to have a full album that makes a statement?

That’s just the way that I think. My whole life, I’ve always thought in terms of albums, even though I love singles and I don’t necessarily value the album art form over a career of great singles. There’s plenty of people that I put in the singles category who are no worse than people who make great albums. But for me, personally, even when I was a kid, in bands in high school, we always used to make albums, even though we were a little bit unprepared to do so.

I was hanging out with a friend of mine from high school and we were talking about our band’s discography [laughs] and I realized that we had made three distinct albums. We finished them, put the songs together, burned like 100 CDs, and sold them at our shows, gave them to friends and made album art. Because we like making albums.

So maybe it is just a vestigial quirk, but a lot of the way that I think about lyrics is album oriented too. There have to be connections between them, and I think Rostam thinks about things in the same way in terms of music. We try to have there be something cohesive happening, at least for these first three albums.

It’s interesting that you chose a producer who is known for producing hit singles, with Ariel Rechtshaid having produced “Hey There Delilah” for Plain White T’s and “Climax” for Usher.

He has produced Cass McCombs albums too! It’s good to have your feet in both worlds. I’ll admit as a listener, I probably listen more to singles than full albums, but maybe that’s because I’m hard to please. I haven’t been that impressed in a while. But a great album has to have songs that you can take out and take away.

On a great album, every song could be somebody’s favorite song. And they might think that one song is not really for them, but another song could be, and it becomes a “single” for them. I know in our band and a lot of bands I grew up liking, a lot of the favorite songs are singles. We’ve had singles that are very different from some of the deeper cuts on the album. It makes the band more interesting to have those different sides.

When you signed up to be Metro’s special guest, we had brainstormed a Style component, where we itemized each component of your outfit, but you guys didn’t seem to like that idea. Why not?

I like talking about style, conceptually, but when I have to talk about what I’m wearing, I feel embarrassed. I don’t know why I look at it so differently. I don’t think there’s anything lightweight or frivolous about fashion or style, but CT and I went to the VMAs the other week and occasionally people would stop and say, “What are you wearing?” and I just wanted to be like, “A suit.” But if we could do something on Ralph…

Ralph?

Ralph Lifshitz from the Bronx.

[Shrugs]

AKA Ralph Lauren…

OK, so I don’t follow fashion that closely. Is Ralph Lauren a designer you’re really into?

I used to be a little bit more, but I’ll always have a soft spot for the brand and the fun of the made-up world that they put together. Somebody was telling me that somebody they knew was writing a book about all of these people that came from the Bronx in the same era. It’s interesting to me because that’s where my dad’s side of the family is from and where my dad grew up. Ralph Lauren and this guy Mickey Drexler, who now runs J. Crew and who had previously kind of saved the Gap and is sort of a fashion/business icon. Even Calvin Klein is from the Bronx.

What’s interesting about the Bronx being next to Manhattan is that there’s some kind of power being just outside of where the action’s happening. I feel somewhat similar being from New Jersey, although the Bronx is a different vibe and is different socioeconomically. If you look at all of these people that came from the Bronx, and hip-hop came from the Bronx, Manhattan is more the center of activity, but as far as people who come out of it the Bronx probably has it beat.

Sense of place has always been an important part of the Vampire Weekend aesthetic. In this album you mention so many different places — Phoenix, Providence, Los Angeles, etc. — but as a whole this album seems to be the first one to be dedicated to New York City.

All of our albums have had some New York references, but this is the first one that I truly thought of as being set in New York. I mean, when you live in New York, obviously that’s going to always be a sort of home base, but yeah, the first album was very much New England. In some ways you could consider New York to be an honorary part of New England, because I feel like once you get past New York, New England is totally done. But this is the first one where I thought of New York as truly being the center of it.

In our band we’ve always talked a lot about vibe, which is not unique to us, because music is often hard to describe so you often have to talk in terms of vibe. Sometimes you have to be like, “Meh, the vibe is wrong,” or “We’re going for this kind of vibe,” but a vibe is really a vague set of ideas that somehow create a whole that’s greater than the sum of its parts, and to me that’s why places are so useful in terms of thinking about albums. Because that’s what a place is! New York has a vibe, Boston has a vibe, London has a vibe, but what is a city? It’s a mishmash of different people, most of whom don’t even talk to each other, different neighborhoods that sometimes don’t even cross paths and different places, but somehow we still feel like there is something bigger.

Do you make sure when you namecheck a city that you do have experience there?

It depends on the song. Like on the first album, all of the Cape Cod places that I namechecked were places that I actually had been, albeit somewhat briefly. But like on the song “Step” on this album, there is a lot of namechecking, and I’ve never been to someplace like Dar es Salaam, but part of that song is about somebody who in the beginning is talking about how they were going all of these different places, but really back at home is where they really have to figure things out.

That song “Step” is also the one where you sing the line about a modest mouse. The last time you dropped a recording artist’s name — Peter Gabriel in “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa” — he ended up covering the song. Were you hoping that Modest Mouse might do the same with this?

That would be exciting, if they wanted to.

In the video, the phrase is not in title case. Does the lyric really have anything to do with the band Modest Mouse?

Not really. I saw some kids on Twitter and YouTube debating, “Is that a reference to the band or is that a reference to Virginia Woolf?” Because that’s where they got their name, from a phrase that she used. But to me — and this is hard to describe without sounding too highfalutin — basically that whole song, “Step,” can sometimes give the impression of being a bunch of random words and phrases put together, which I think at times people have accused Vampire Weekend lyrics of being something like that, just random s— put together, but to me that song is kind of using that randomness, but still actually telling a story.

It’s kind of like a conversation between two people and rather than somebody saying, “Oh, you’re talking yourself up” or “You’re being immodest,” they would say it in a referencey way and call somebody a modest mouse, perhaps sarcastically. It’s referencey because of the band and because the band’s name is a reference too. It’s certainly no kind of a commentary or reference to their music, but it’s just the idea of somebody calling a modest mouse.

The lyrics that you sing most in that song almost seem like an apt description of where Vampire Weekend are in 2013, “the gloves are off, the wisdom teeth are out.”

Yeah, to me that’s just a highfalutin referencey way to describe growing up. Even in that part about the modest mouse thing, the line before that, there’s a reference to a Jandek album.

That’s funny. I got that reference, but then thought, “No, they can’t be referencing that!” And I just assumed “ready for the house” was some poker or gambling term or something that I wasn’t familiar with.

It just seemed funny to me to tell a story or show a conversation that’s totally made out of references, because it can be meaningful. I’m definitely not trying to make any connection between Jandek and Modest Mouse. A conversation like that can feel random, but to me that song makes more sense than almost any song I’ve ever done.

If we can backtrack a little, I don’t think we quite exhausted the style discussion. When Vampire Weekend first came out, a lot of people were paying attention to your style. How much consideration went into that? Was it a conscious thing or was it you guys just wearing onstage what you were wearing anyway?

It was both. My tastes had already leaned toward the preppy side, but in a somewhat detached way. It’s not like I grew up dressing that way exactly. But by the time I got to college I got more interested in wearing boat shoes and finding old Lacoste shirts at thrift stores, and for me it was very much tied up with the music and with the ideas in the music and the idea of having a preppy band just seemed funny and fun. So when people talked about it, it wasn’t surprising. Even in the songs there are references to clothes, and it’s very much tied into the fabric — no pun intended — of that first album and those early songs.

What surprised me was the people didn’t have the same sense of humor towards it as I did. Sometimes I’d wear fairly extreme things. I used to have this yellow Polo sweater with dogs on it, which to me is so funny and insane that it surprised me that anybody would see somebody wearing something like that and be like, “These guys are like prep school villains.” So that was surprising that not everybody got in on the joke, but as you get older, you realize that not everybody is going to have the same super-specific sense of humor towards these things. It’s complicated. It’s not that I find preppy clothing or preppiness despicable and it’s a big joke, nor do I find it totally natural.

I think the backlash probably had to do with the fact that never before had a preppy band really existed. Rock ‘n’ roll is not traditionally the domain of this type of person.

I’ve said this a few times before in interviews, but if you look at the way people dress now— and I’m not saying that we were the cause of it, but we were just in the right place at the right time, when things were changing — but definitely people who would have previously looked at boat shoes and button-down shirts as being some uptight way of dressing, that now seems like a very normal, neutral way for a hipster/yuppie/normal dude to dress. All of these things are just signifiers and at the time, these were just interesting signifiers to play with. Now, they’re not quite as interesting. They used to mean a lot more. They used to get people hot underneath the collar.

Hot underneath the popped collar!

Exactly! But now nobody’s going to care. That’s how everything works though. Things mean something and then they settle down and don’t mean anything anymore.

It feels like your band has grown out of things in a similar way. A song about an Oxford comma or walking across campus just wouldn’t fit on the “Modern Vampires of the City” album. Conversely, it would have been weird if you were singing about mortality as much as you do now on the first album.

For me, personally, on a basic level, I probably have become a bit more melancholy at this phase of my life than I was when I was 21. But I think it’s natural. When we made our first album, and when those first songs were written — and maybe this is why people connected to it — that album clearly gave off a collegiate vibe. Everything about it gives that aura, and that’s how old we were when those songs were written.

In the very early days, right around the time that I started writing “Oxford Comma” and Rostam started writing “Campus,” that was all there. Like anybody, whether you’re in college or in your early 20s, doing whatever, there’s a sense that it’s an eternal springtime. And that’s also true for a band that’s making their first album. So we had that threefold: A bunch of young cats, fresh out of college, suddenly people have interest in our band! That atmosphere was in the air. And then when you do something a second time it’s still exciting, and you’re building and you start to get to the third time, and unless you’re a total craven careerist, you’re going to pause a little bit and be like, “OK, so we’re doing this for a third time. We’re now five or six years older than when we started. Is this just a job? Are we just banging out products of varying degrees of quality, based on an initial template? Or are we trying to do something different?” So that right there is an introspective question.

You don’t have to ask yourself too much like, “Who am I? Who are we?” on your first two albums, because a good band usually starts and a bunch of ideas are there and you’re excited. But if we had made “Contra” Part Two it wouldn’t have worked. When “Contra” came out, to me it seemed very different from the first album, but in some ways the first album is like A and the second album is like A Prime. It’s like a lot of the same ideas taken to a new level. This album does feel a little different. And those first two were a little closer together in time, so that’s naturally going to feel a little different. But if we had made another album that was too close to the first two, I think the fans probably would have been a little bored and we would have been a little bored.

You have to become a little bit more introspective to figure out why you should keep being a band. If your first batch of ideas run out of steam a little bit, you have to stop and ask what it means to be a band or a songwriter. Because it’s very easy to succumb to the pressure of just feeling like, “Time to make an album…” Sometimes that could produce something that’s good and casual and quick, but that wouldn’t have worked for us this time. Maybe in the future. I don’t want to spend every three years of my life obsessing over this.

When you paused and asked yourselves if you were in this as a career, what was the answer you arrived at? I’ve read that you have said these three albums were like a trilogy. So that means a chapter has closed now. What is the next chapter?

I’m not sure. It’s a funny time when you work so hard on an album and then you finally finish it and then you’ve just got to go on tour and get into the drudgery of touring. It leaves you in a funny place. There are times when I think of some of the leftover stuff from this album; some of the stuff that stylistically wasn’t quite right or that we didn’t have time to finish, and I think, “Man, it’s going to be exciting to work on that stuff and to get back into it and work on the next album!”

And also this album has brought us to a place where it’s comforting to know that there are people who have been true fans of our band for six years now. And they’ve watched us change and make very different types of songs on different albums, so it’s comforting to know that there are people like that out there, because that makes you feel like as long as it’s good, you can kind of do whatever you want, whereas sometimes people’s fans can be a little bit more judgmental. I feel like we’re in a good place, creatively. The next album can be one of a million things. We don’t have to create a specific sound or anything like that.

And you have had the luxury of having experimented with so many different things like auto-tuning and pitch-shifting, so that if you experiment more, you know that those fans will have your back, right? I do seem to recall some outcry when there was auto-tune on the second album, but now that you’ve done that, it will be harder to make people say, “Where the hell did THIS come from?”

Certainly not. It’s like we want every song to be somebody’s favorite, and we want every album to be somebody’s favorite. And in some ways I feel like our greatest accomplishment is that we’ve made three albums of which large numbers of people consider each to be the best. What more could you ask for? That’s the hardest thing to pull off. Sometimes everybody likes the first album the best, a handful of people like the second album the best and nobody likes the third album the best. I was really happy to see in the response from fans, people were saying that this new album, people were saying, “This is my favorite album!” It’s not because I have a chip on my shoulder that’s like, “I want people to like this album more than the first two!” I just want there to exist people in the universe who could feel that way, because that makes me feel like we’re still earning their trust. We haven’t begun the coasting period yet.

And when does that begin?

I think the coasting period begins when you put out two consecutive albums that nobody thinks are your best. But people still come to your shows to hear the old shit and people are still kind of interested in you.

It’s interesting to hear you speak about the fans so much and how plugged into their opinions you are. From the music you make it wouldn’t seem like you were seeking approval.

Given how many people — critics and random people — hated on us when we first came out, we have to have a somewhat flexible relationship to what people think. [Laughs.] And definitely, the dream is to not give a f—. But as we see with many artists who claim to not give a f—, of course they do. Kanye is probably the greatest artist of our generation, and he’s always talking about how he doesn’t give a f—, but he’s also always talking about how he does give a f—. It’s two sides of the same coin. I would love to eventually get to a place where I could be so relaxed and be like, “As long as we think it’s good, nothing in the world matters.”

But that’s not exactly what this whole world of music that we participate in is about. As soon as you start releasing albums, you are out there promoting yourself and promoting your product. You can’t front and be like, “I just made this for me! Why is everybody giving it grades and writing about it and expressing their opinions about it?” You can’t say that. If you truly feel that way, then make music for yourself and get a day-job. So that’s what it is. That’s the bargain. As nice as it would be to not care what people think, we’re always going to care what people think, to some degree.

If you truly believe in and love pop music, the way that we do (and I’m considering ourselves pop music, and taking the broad view) and if you grew up obsessing about pop music and idolizing people like The Clash or Radiohead or Prince, who were able to have long careers in which they changed a lot, part of that is because in addition to following their own visions, they were also able to create things that mattered to people. I think that it’s really cool that The Clash came out and made this early punk album that had all this energy and got people talking, and then six or seven years later they made this dancey hip-hop song about the Middle East that was like a huge hit. I think it’s cool that at those two bookends of their career, they connected with people. It’s not just cool that they changed stylistically. It’s cool that they did it well and that they did it in a way that mattered to people.

I think to not care about what people think is in some ways not to participate in the grand tradition of pop music. It’s a nice fantasy to imagine that it wouldn’t matter. But if our fans totally rejected an album and nobody liked it, I would have to blame ourselves that we f—ed up, I think. When I look around at people who are very popular, like Drake, Kanye, The Weeknd (I’m just thinking of people that I saw at the VMAs) I think that the world isn’t stupid. Artists can take risks, do different shit and it can totally work. It’s not like the world is so conservative, you know I think you’d be kidding yourself if you tried to take solace in some outdated idea that people’s tastes are so conservative or reactionary that they just don’t get it.

But the thing about people “not getting it” is that it can be advantageous when it comes up for reconsideration 10 years later! You know, we talked about if a band makes two bad albums. What if they only make one bad album, but it’s not really that bad, but just ahead of its time?

That’s true. Although I have a feeling that with music from that past 10 years, you’re going to get a lot less things that totally slip through the cracks, just because of the way that music criticism and the Internet and the voices of the fans are heard now. There’s so many ways to move around the old-school music machine that it was a much more plausible scenario in the ’70s, ’80s or ’90s. Somebody releases an album now and the right people don’t hear it? That just doesn’t happen. Did you watch that Big Star movie?

Yeah, but the thing about them that I never knew before was that they really didn’t tour! I interviewed [Big Star drummer] Jody Stephens for that movie, and I was asking him about touring and he said aside from a few one-off gigs and strategically booked shows, they never really toured! The movie kind of glosses over that and that aspect seems conveniently left out of the Big Star legend when people consider this amazing band that was so tragically overlooked. But what you’re saying does seem to make sense. I mean, Nick Drake wouldn’t have fallen through the cracks if he’d had a MySpace page in 2007.

Right. And it doesn’t mean he would have been Bob Dylan, but he would have been able to tour, he would have had many fans, and Big Star is kind of the same in that way. But I don’t think that can happen today. There might be some great albums that nobody’s played for anybody though.

Is there even anybody that you’re privy to that you think could use more exposure?

Nobody comes to mind, but maybe that’s because I’ve been out on the road and I’m a little bit out of touch so I don’t know too many people who are just starting out. I do feel like a lot of stuff that gets released gets a fair shake. Usually, one way or another, an audience comes to it. … It is hard for me to think of anybody that is truly getting slept on.

I went on a drive last week and I was listening to the A$AP Ferg album. I thought there were some really great songs on it, I liked his vibe and I think it’s a well-crafted album. And then I saw it debuted in the top 10, and it’s his first album and I was like, “Well, that seems about right.” That’s cool that people are excited about that. … He’s part of the A$AP Mob and it has a lot in common, stylistically, with the A$AP Rocky stuff, and Bone Thugs-N-Harmony are actually on a track and there are other songs where he actually sings like Bone Thugs. And sometimes he gets into this crazy almost Jamaican patois thing. It’s just a very vibey album. He’s also got really consistent imagery throughout, like the album is called, “Trap Lord,” and there’s a song called “Hood Pope.” … I’d listened to plenty of A$AP Rocky, but I didn’t know too much about Ferg.

We spoke briefly about the themes of mortality on “Modern Vampires of the City,” but let’s discuss it a little more. Did somebody close to you die recently?
No, nobody close to me died, but some people close to me have started talking about death a lot more. Thankfully I have not suffered a major loss, but aging and the changes it brings about I feel like are somewhat prominent in my life, but in the way that it is for everybody. For me, mortality and the way we think about aging, dying and death is something that is such an obvious part of the human experience. At any part in your life, that can become a big concern or something that you think about, whether you think about it in a fearful, negative way or just in a philosophical way.

Some people, it happens when you’re 14. I think for me, it also has to do with what we were talking about with the first two albums being this rush of excitement and newness and then suddenly you just kind of pause. And maybe a little bit too much time to ruminate on meaning and purpose; stuff that’s probably better to just keep your head down and work. But that’s the only negative thing about not having a 9-to-5, is having a little too much time to think.

Rostam Batmanglij has lived under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass for three years. The noise of passing trains infrequently interrupts conversation while sitting in his kitchen, but his bedroom/makeshift recording studio in the next room is far enough away that those noises don’t make their way onto Vampire Weekend albums.

The multi-instrumentalist says the late-night recording and writing sessions he has spent here with songwriting cohort Ezra Koenig have been very productive, but for their third album, “Modern Vampires of the City,” the band did a few things they don’t usually do, namely bringing in an outside producer in Ariel Rechtshaid, and even getting out of New York City for a little while.

We spoke with Batmanglij on the eve of the band doing just that again, as they embark upon a tour that will take them through the end of November. (The tour kicks off at the Mann Center for Performing Arts in Philly on Sept. 19 and comes to the Barclays Center in Brooklyn on Sept. 20.)

Where do you see yourself in the band?

In terms of do I want to make music that makes other people happy?

Or not necessarily that makes other people happy, but how do you want to affect other people?

It’s hard for me to separate how I feel about music from how I imagine others do. But I definitely feel like there’s certain music that I’d listen to that I’ve tried to play for other people and they say, “what is this pop garbage?” But to me, there’s things about it that are fascinating from a level of songwriting and construction. I understand why people are turned off by certain elements. I guess I hear it a little bit differently. I can hear something in it maybe that appeals to me while recognizing that other people might find it uncool.

Give me an example of one of the songs on the new album; is there a keyboard part that you’re thinking of or anything in particular?

One example is the chord progression of the chorus of “Don’t Lie.” That’s something I actually wrote on guitar. In some ways, I feel if I just strummed it for you on the guitar right now, you’d say that sounds like a country song. But setting it in the context of the drums that we have on there and the harpsichord and the strings and the way things sound, I think it’s pretty far removed from a country song.

But I guess for me, flirting with some elements that are really mainstream has an appeal. If you can ride this line, you can make it as weird as you want it to be, but also, you can be inside of this world of a classic song that anyone can hear and anyone can be moved by. I think there is a line you can straddle where you can be complex and you can have interlocking parts and you can reference classical music that you love, but also you can just write a pop song. That’s something that me and Ezra have always seen eye to eye on. Whatever music we make, we want it to be able to connect with anybody.

You say that chord progression sounded country; how do you go about taking it away from that and making it sound the way it sounded?

One way is in the way that it’s mixed. Push the guitar back. The guitar doesn’t have to be loud and bright, it can sound a little bit f—ed up and have attitude, and it can be hanging out in the back of the mix. The way the drums sound, the way the vocals sound, all those things can start to put you in a different world. I think in some ways, that song was referencing A Tribe Called Quest. It started with me taking some drums and really chopping them up. … I’m interested in music that appeals to the pleasure centers of the brain.


That makes sense. What made you want to have a co-producer? I feel like people usually go the other way; they are hands-off then they get more hands-on. But for the third album for you to sit back and say that you want to collaborate more with somebody...

It wasn’t so much relinquishing; it was more sharing the role of producer. It made sense on this record, just kind of how the songs came about and how we went about writing them. There were a lot of things sketched in from the very start. The production began at the songwriting phase, and then it was nice to have someone else who could really focus on production and who had a fresh take on things. We spent about a year working on the songs for the record.

Independent of production? Just working on the songs?

That's just the way that we work … things that we recorded here made it on the final record.

Really? Like what?

Like the piano of “Ya Hey” on my piano that’s here. Me and Ezra got together a few times a week for about a year and were working on songs, improving them, writing new ones, and forcing ourselves to come up with something. Sometimes we didn’t come up with anything and sometimes we came up with really amazing stuff. ... To get out of New York was kind of important too. It was nice to get away.

That’s interesting, because one of the things Ezra and I were talking about was how New York this record is, but I guess maybe you needed to get out to look back at it?

Most of the record was written by the time we left. It got to the point where it was time to finish these recordings and it was "let’s go to L.A. and we can record real drums at an old studio there. We can just focus on recordings and we can have Ariel listen to stuff and he’ll say, ‘OK, this song is almost totally done, but how about changing this one thing?" Or saying, “What do you guys think? Do you like how it is?” And sometimes we’d be like, “Yeah, but do you have any ideas?” Other times we just wanted to try some things we hadn’t done. Like “Obvious Bicycle,” that was one of the first songs we put together. It started with a piece of piano and drum music that I sent to Ezra, and he started writing on top of it. That one, kind of everything but the piano chords, changed.

Describe the recording process here. Are you working all hours of the night, or are you waiting for the train to not go by to do it? Actually, it looks like you’ve got some pretty good isolation over there. What train is that by the way that keeps passing?

I actually don't know what train that is. I like not taking the train as much as possible, and doing transportation other ways in New York, like riding a bike or walking.

Describe the writing and recording process before Ariel entered the picture.

We started getting together here in May of 2011. We worked pretty steadily and decided to try to shake things up and go to Martha’s Vineyard to do a writing session in April of 2012. Actually, that was kind of the end. The three songs we started in Martha’s Vineyard were the last three.

Where did you guys stay?

We stayed with a friend who was living out there in the off-season.… An old friend was basically staying at this house that was in his family for a while. He’s sort of the only one there. It’s in Chilmark.

They invented sign language there!

Really?

Yeah, it was because of inbreeding. There were so few people there that there was inbreeding and people were born with birth defects. They had to make up a way of communicating because so many were born deaf. They called these people the Chillmark Deaf, and it was a thing. Anyway, please continue...

There were two kind of small cottages that were next to each other. One of them was converted into a writing studio. I had a bunch of instruments out, I had a microphone out. There was one song that Ezra had the chords for that was called “Hudson.” He was like, “It only sounds good when I sing in French!” I was like, “just pretend you’re singing it French but sing it in English!” Then we recorded some scratch vocals which were sort of gibberish, but that became the start of the song. “Everlasting Arms” and “Don’t Lie” were the other two, and those started with music that I made. The way we did those is Ezra went walking around, writing some thoughts in the wooded areas of Martha’s Vineyard. I was in the studio trying to build up the instrumental music of a song as fast as I could and not think twice and trust my gut. I’d hit "record" and be like, “Is this a chorus? Is this a verse? Let’s see what happens.” And then Ezra got in front of the microphone and it was amazing how quickly melodies, and in some cases lyrics, were written.

And you did some lyrics on that one too, right?

On “Don’t Lie”? Just the word “don’t”. I get additional lyrics credit. On this record, Ezra wrote pretty much all of the lyrics, except for “Young Lion.” … and the “don’t” in “Don’t Lie.” On the last record there were songs that we collaborated more extensively.

How does the interplay between you two work? I spoke with Ezra about how there are themes on this record and how they’re more — and I hesitate to use this word, just as I hesitated to use it with him — mature. But they are more mature. There’s no songs about walking across campus on this album, there’s no songs about an Oxford comma on this album. Did he come to you with lyrics and say, “Hey, this is what I’m working on,” and did that inform the music at all? Or was it mostly just lyrics at the end?

We wrote songs in so many different ways on this album. The song “Step,” Ezra wrote that in his head. When we were working on it, I was like, “what chords were you listening to, did you make any kind of track, were you playing the piano or anything?” He was like, “No, I heard it in my head.” He had kind of envisioned the lyrics and melodies independent of any music. We sat down in front of a computer and started putting stuff in. "What about this melody on the piano?"; "What about this melody on the harpsichord?"; "What about this kind of drumbeat?" We both had ideas.

In the liner notes, you mention that song borrows from a song by YZ. Where in that song’s evolution did you realize it sounded like another song?

We recognized from the get-go that there’s this whole genre of songs that are connected. There’s a lot of them in the world. Basically they’re connecting with a tradition. We were very aware of the fact that we were connecting with that tradition from the get-go. And we were OK with that. We wanted to make something that was distinct, and that flirted with “Pachelbel’s Canon,” or flirted with “Our House,” but never crossed the line.

There’s a little bit of flirting with, or even hitting on (to extend your analogy a little further) “All the Young Dudes.”

That’s part of that family of songs, with descending motion, that’s connected and harmonized in different ways. We knew that, and it was kind of a matter of trying different things. At one point, I was like, "What if all of the organ chords were minor chords, but they fit into this descending scheme?" What you hear in some ways sounds happy and familiar, but on another level it’s sad and brooding. I remember at one point in that song getting a very distinct feeling of a place in Manhattan called Riverside Park. … In the middle of working on the song, it was like I was standing there. I felt like we were onto something good because I had such a distinct feeling.

As a career as a musician, you get to rebuild and revisit those things. Does that carry over to when you’re playing that song live?

(laughs) I don’t know. I try to think about nothing when I’m performing live. I feel like that’s the state you most want to be in.

Why? Tell me more.

That’s when you’re in the moment, and you’re free. You don’t want to be thinking about what you’re going to be doing after the show, or what you’re worried about in your life. You want to let go of those things.

With playing bigger venues now, is that harder? … Are you looking at people at all, or thinking that? The Lollapalooza gig in particular, was that the biggest crowd you’ve ever played to?

Might have been.

Does that awareness creep in? And does that awareness creep in when you’re making the music also, of the fact that more people are going to buy this than bought the last one, because the people who bought the last one told their friends that you were a band that was worth buying the albums of. It’s interesting, I forget who said it, but you can’t control who likes your music, and as you get more popular, people are going to misinterpret your songs and that sort of thing.

I’ve read that’s what Kurt Cobain said.

Right, and I think Roger Waters said something about how you can’t control what the person way way in back is thinking while watching you, or if they’re even hearing the music, or if they’re there for the music. Could you speak to the expanding audience and that awareness?

I wonder if our audience has expanded, I guess it kind of has. I don’t know though.

I guess it’s tough because even though you guys have had two No. 1 albums, in this day and age a No. 1 album doesn’t mean what it meant 10 years ago.

I think we have carved out a little space that’s our own. I think we’re pretty happy about that. I think it’s a pretty good place to be. Who knows what will happen in the future, but I like that we’ve never felt like we weren’t being ourselves.

If we could backtrack a little bit, you were talking about feeling present in a park while coming up with that part of the song "Step." Geography has always seemed very important to Vampire Weekend songs, whether it be lyrical references or musical homages. I remember we spoke for the first album when you guys were on the second leg of the tour. We talked about Cape Cod and you had never even been there at that point. But now for this album you went to an island off the coast of the Cape. How important is geography to you with music?

I think it’s definitely something that’s connected. When I hear music, I am sort of always connecting it with a place. When I hear a song, if the song’s any good, it takes you somewhere.

Are you happy with people saying, “That’s their New York album” about this album? Do you think that’s true?

I think they’re all New York albums in a way.

Where’d the title come from?

The title came from Ezra. It’s from the song “One Blood” by Junior Reid. It’s a reggae song.

There’s lots of little reggae homages going on in this record. You guys sample a Ras Michaels song too.

He’s not entirely reggae, he’s nyabinghi, but yeah.

Then there’s all the Zion and Babylon lyrical references going on.

The most reggae thing is when you have the chords on the off beat. And we actually have that on every album but not on this one. It was kind of this goal, "How can we make this music feel like reggae and how can we reference Jamaican history and culture without entering the world of the most obvious reggae group?"

But then there's that organ on "Unbelievers." You can picture that on “The Harder They Come” soundtrack.

That’s awesome that you say that. That wasn’t the idea behind it. The idea was Bob Dylan, like the Hammond organs you hear on “Like a Rolling Stone,” but I’m glad that you hear that.

So were you guys listening to a lot of reggae when you were doing this album?

I think we’re always listening to a fair amount of reggae. We grew up listening to it.

There’s less of the references to the initial albums. I think they were characterized by some Afrobeat influences, and I don’t hear much of that on this one. Or is it just that it’s such a part of your signature that I’m not hearing it anymore?

I think that there’s certain songs that sound more African than anything we’ve ever done, like the song “Everlasting Arms.” … And then when I was coming up with the drumbeat for “Finger Back” I was thinking about wanting a moment to sound African, and a moment to sound like a punk drumbeat, and to kind of be switching between those things. I think when we think about African music, it’s kind of connected. We’ve always thought about how it’s been connected to all kinds of music, like Western classical music, or pop music. We never thought of it as some kind of island. I think it informs a lot of decisions that we make at the root level. So even if you don’t hear it, we feel like it’s there.

It’s part of your identity, and it’s part of what the world first heard when they heard you.

That’s true.

This is a weird example, but it’s kind of like how No Doubt started as a ska band, and they’ll always be thought of as coming from that in anything they do.

Totally.

Who is YZ? I don’t know about that reference, but I saw it in the liner notes. I know I should have probably just looked at that online and pretended I knew that, but I didn't think of it until now.

He had a song where he said, “Every time I see you in the world you always step to my girl.” That song was sampled by Souls of Mischief. When I said that Ezra wrote the vocal melody and lyrics for “Step” in his head, maybe Ezra was kind of inspired by some things, one of them being this song "Step to My Girl" by Souls of Mischief, which you should check out. ... They were a West Coast rap group. I think they made that song when they were 15. It’s kind of like a lost song. So that song samples YZ.

With the collaborative process of producing, do you think that’s how you envision the future of Vampire Weekend?

Yeah, I can imagine that going any number of different ways. Ariel’s one of my closest friends, so I think we will work together on more things in the future for sure.

One thing I did read on the Internet is that you’ve been working with Hamilton Leithauser from The Walkmen! I didn’t even know he was doing a solo album!

It’s been awesome. I’ve got to say, I’m really excited about the two songs that we did together. I think they’re amazing.

I’m a huge Walkmen fan.

Me too. ... I heard that he was working on stuff on his own, and also with Paul from The Walkmen. I was on a train down to D.C. and I ran into a friend. He mentioned he was working on stuff, and I just reached out to him. I was like, “We should hang out.” We got together here and just started working on stuff. We wrote these two songs pretty quickly, they came out real fast. ... Working on songwriting so much with Ezra in this apartment got me to able to do things really fast. like sketch in the chords, sketch in the drums, set up the vocal mic. I try and do things so quickly that there’s never any time to look back. Look back when you have a finished song; when you have a verse and chorus, that’s the time you should look back.

That was how we did “Unbelievers” here; working on building up the track, laying down the piano parts and the guitar parts and the organ parts. At the same time, Ezra’s sitting with a laptop in front of him and he was just writing lyrics and melodies. And it was just coming out so quickly, I was really amazed when he just threw down the vocal and it was so catchy and the lyrics were so good. I’m so happy that we could write a song in five hours. It was a similar thing with Hamilton, writing songs really quickly, and throwing in ideas really quickly and not really looking back. He’s taught me a lot about singing, because his voice is so crazy.

They are just one of those bands that I scratch my head and say, “Why aren’t they huge?” I guess what they do is so unique that it’s hard for the mainstream to totally embrace them.

The Walkmen should be bigger; they are a great band. But I think there’s a lot of people that feel the way we do.

I spoke to Ezra a bit about style. I don’t know if you have any strong opinions on style and how important that is to the band. It almost feels like now, at this stage, it’s not necessary to pay attention to it. With the first album, when you come out of obscurity, and you’re wearing preppy clothes that’s a talking point, but two albums later, it’s not necessarily a talking point. But I'd be remiss if I didn't get your take on it.

It’s always been really important to me that our music connects with a visual aesthetic that’s our own. Even from the early days when I used to make a sort of makeshift poster for every show we did, I started to kind of discover what I wanted to see, which was a white border.

How pissed were you when Instagram came along and that white border was accessible to the masses?

Not pissed at all! I loved Instagram! I remember the first time I ever used it, I was going crazy, like five posts in an hour. I’m a fan of it. There used to be a link on vampireweekend.com/pastshows.html, where you can see these old show posters. [Ed. note: the link is no longer there] And it’s not every show we ever did, but just forming an aesthetic that is our own and has a few rules. That’s always been really important to me. And I think it’s been really important that when you see us on stage as a band, that we be somewhat unified. That was important since the very first show.

Another thing I'd be remiss if I didn't ask about, although it's sort of old news, but it happened since the last time you and I spoke: Talk about publicly coming out, if you could...

I came out in January of 2010. ... It was right when "Contra" was coming out. The first piece that I came out in was a Rolling Stone profile, and it was actually the first time that anyone had really wanted to write an article about our lives in depth. But also when we were working on the song “Diplomat’s Son” from "Contra," that was a song where Ezra and I really collaborated pretty extensively on the lyrics. It had started from this short story that was about a paragraph long that he sent me, and I kind of started to imagine it as a love story between two guys. When we were working on that song and writing lyrics together, at some point I realized that I was definitely going to come out. It was important to me that coming out be connected to something real, like a song that has a gay story in it. In that way, it felt very natural and organic.

It's interesting how far society has come in the past decade or so. Like think about when George Michael came out and it was a huge scandal almost. But now it just causes a very minor media ripple.

I think that if you’re going to go out of your way to dislike Vampire Weekend, then one of the members being gay is probably at the bottom of the list — if you’re going to make a list. I feel like there’s so many other things you would try to find to hate us for. Society has come far. I definitely felt like reading an interview with Ed from Grizzly Bear before I came out made me feel very comfortable.

Here’s my ignorance: I didn’t know he was gay. People make such a little deal out of it.

Ed subsequently became a close friend. He knew I was gay before I came out, and he was someone I could sort of text and be like, “I’m coming out!” On a bunch of levels, it felt good to not be alone in it, even though I’m the only gay member of the band.

I would like to touch briefly on the other members of the band. When you and Ezra are writing and recording, do you two ever think of yourselves as the Jagger/Richards type of thing? I only reference the Glimmer Twins because you have that copy of "Sticky Fingers" on the mantle.

We always share things, and our ears are always open to suggestion. On this album, we worked on a bunch of songs as a band. There’s a lot of things that are weird about this record, or unique, or that surprise me. When I took a step back from the final product, I think it’s because we said, “We gotta trust our feelings. What are the best songs that we have?” We’ve never written this many songs on an album.

How many are there?

Depending on how you count, maybe about 50 ideas. Maybe 60.

So 20 years from now there will be the boxed set?

Well the songs, they’re not bad, they just don’t have that spark or that magic that the others do. On this album, we don’t have any Ezra guitar riff songs. Every album prior to this has had those Ezra guitar riffs. It surprised me when I realized I played all the guitar on the album. Basically, it was just about following our gut instincts. "Is this a great song? Or is this a great song?" Should we put a song on an album just because it has a guitar riff? And the answer was absolutely not. We couldn’t not trust those instincts.

We had to trust the instinct of being really hard on ourselves and a little bit brutal. We don’t rule anything out. The way this album came together really surprised me, but I think the next one will probably surprise me too. I can imagine us working as four in a room again and having amazing results.

Ezra and I spoke a little bit about this album being the last in a trilogy. Do you feel like after this one you’re going anywhere?

Yeah, I do feel that. It feels pretty exciting.Back