Song Exploder - Vampire Weekend - Harmony Hall

Episode Date: December 25, 2019

The band Vampire Weekend started in 2006, in New York. Their third album came out in 2013, and was named one of the best albums of the year all over the place, and it won a Grammy. But it took six years for their next album, Father of the Bride, to come out. This album’s also been nominated for a Grammy, for album of the year. And the lead single from it, “Harmony Hall,” was nominated for Best Rock Song.In this episode, Ezra Koenig from Vampire Weekend takes “Harmony Hall” apart. I spoke to him along with producer Ariel Rechtshaid, and the two of them detailed winding path the song went down, over several years, before it finally took shape.songexploder.net/vampire-weekend

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. My name is Rishi Keshe, Hereway. The band Vampire Weekend started in 2006 in New York. Their third album came out in 2013 and won a Grammy, but six years passed before they put out their next album, Father of the Bride. This album's also been nominated for a Grammy, for Album of the Year. And the lead single from it, Harmony Hall, was nominated for Best Rock Song. In this episode, Ezra Kainig from Vampire Weekend takes Harmony Hall apart. I spoke to him along with producer Ariel Rekshide,

and the two of them detailed the winding path the song went down over several years before it finally took shape. I'm Ezra Kainig from Vampire Weekend. The very first time there was any bit of this song was me walking down the street kind of mumbling and saying something about Harmony Hall. I found a voice memo that is the beginning of the song, and I'm outside. You can hear other voices.

And I saw that was from 2011. I was actually surprised by how old that was. But, you know, time flies. And so I remember thinking like, okay, there's a phrase, Harmony Hall. and there's like a vague idea. And I definitely thought that it had potential as a song. You know, maybe over the next year, try it once or twice with an eye

to it being on Modern Vampires or third album. But I just couldn't quite crack it. You know, there was a time where I tried some version of it or I played on the piano and it would be kind of like this more Chui Baroque sound. But I never quite felt satisfied with it. So I probably wouldn't have really busted it out in earnest until 2015 or 2016.

Those are the years when I, after doing all the promotional stuff and touring behind the third album and taking time off, that's when I really started to think about making another album. And, you know, when you're in that early days period, you think about what am I interested in now, what's something to be excited about, what type of music do I want to make? And one answer that I had was, I want to, like, dig deeper into, like, the history of rock music.

There was something about wanting to change the palette a little bit. There's this little iPhone recording of me playing piano in my apartment in New York. There was something about the way that I was playing piano and that started making me think about like southern rock and classic rock. I guess I always had these weird feelings about rock music and what does rock music mean? I think there was something that I found interesting and funny about being in a moment when people were making these really sweeping statements

about like rock music is dead and it's like pointless and there's nothing interesting in it. Kind of like depressed Wall Street dude vibe of just being like stocks in the toilet. I started to think of it as kind of like, oh great, it's a bargain then. People are like undervaluing this

or they're not understanding it or they're missing the humor or they're missing. I don't know. So for me in some ways that was classic rock. But I kind of felt like Van Perugan was very disconnected from rock music especially when we came out, you get corny old dudes like Alice Cooper making fun

of us because we didn't rock that hard. He had some like goofy quote where he was like, I heard this name, Vampire Week, it's sound pretty cool, checked it out. He said something about like, we must have like low testosterone or something like that. Weird thing to say about a stranger. But for me, the idea of referencing classic rock

when I felt like Vampir Weekin had been so kind of disconnected from it that there was something funny about being like, well, like kind of what's in there? So yeah, I was asking those questions. and I was starting to at least come up with an inclination or something. Because, you know, at first, there's so many directions one can go in. And this is what happens, it's like just very slowly over time. You have a song.

Every time you sit down at the piano, you mess around. And one day you start just going, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, you know, just another way to play the chords. And, you know, I had this guitar riff that I tried here and there. I was hanging out with Mark Ronson. He was ringing on this Lady Gaga album at the time and I think I just stopped by to visit. I was talking to him and I was just kind of mindlessly playing something. It almost sounds like an exercise.

You know, you're kind of going up and down. My memory is that it was like a split-second decision about like, is this riff that cool? And I remember thinking like, it sounds like an exercise. It's not that cool. And then I remember like a voice in my head being like, but you should always record, right? Always be recording.

Like make a little memo of everything. Musicians have to do that a lot because obviously you're already cursed with having kind of a, a wandering mind, but you also don't want to be a sociopath. Just be like kind of get an idea and be like standing there in the kitchen, talking to somebody and being kind of like, you have to excuse me. I have creative work to do. That's like so disrespectful and nutty.

But I do find sometimes a decent middle ground very quickly. Don't disrupt the conversation. Very quickly make a little memo, stop it immediately, and then put the guitar down and say, okay. So when I finally sat down with the aisle and said, okay, I have this idea for a song called Harmony Hall, I had more to pull from, but I still wasn't totally sure how it was all going to come together. I'm Ariel Rekshed. I, along with Ezra and some of our other friends, produced Father of the Bride. I showed him all these disparate parts and I didn't know how they worked together,

and he very quickly came up with a structure. You know, it's almost like an old movie in the kind of pre-digital era where you see somebody like go to an accountant, and they're just like, buddy, I'm in trouble. And they just like hand them like a banker's box just like full of like. like messed up, you know, napkins and stuff. And the counts like, let me see what you got here. I can't make heads or tails of this right now,

but let me arrange this and figure it out. That's sometimes how it feels like when I roll up to Ariel. And I'm just like, I got a lot of ideas. And he's like, all right, show me everything. Let's organize this. That was constantly the journey that we went down to complete a song. There's a lot of different piano parts, but he put my sloppy voice memo,

little groove thing together with my slightly more like highbrow Baroque piano thing and then suddenly they just worked together I never thought of those two parts going together but that breakdown it's one of my favorite parts of the song and then we kind of agreed we were missing

an A section and I was like you know I do have this little riff that maybe could work and then I played it and then he had this idea oh you should do it twice and we'll harmonize the guitars so he very quickly came up with a structure. He took all these ideas that I had and that I was kind of confused by and he made this map very quickly. So similarly to how Ariel had to kind of take all these musical moments and create like an architecture where there's patterns and there's logic and stuff, I had to do that

with words. And the stone walls of I'm in your bear witness. Anybody with the word in mind can never forgive the sight. There have been places that are part of 19th century utopian movements that were somebody would start a town or a building called Harmony Hall. And one time I was in Antigua, a girlfriend at the time who had family there, so we were visiting her family. And there was a place there called Harmony Hall that was, it might have been a resort

or something, but it originally was a slave plantation that was called Harmony Hall. So they kept the name. And obviously this continues to be an ongoing issue because people get married at like plantations, like these really bizarre things where people want to fully erase the history of a place and, you know, be like, oh, it's a gorgeous, gorgeous old house. And then I think as I was looking more at places called Harmony Hall in the world, there were plantations in the South, in the U.S. that were called Harmony Hall. But I think there was something about that dissonance, I guess, pun intended,

that dissonance of a place called Harmony Hall that could refer to both a utopian movement, and also a plantation, which is the opposite of utopia, literally dehumanizing people. And then on top of that, this added thing of being kind of turned into like a fun thing that doesn't have the bloody dehumanizing

racist history of a plantation, and the idea that calling something harmonious doesn't make it harmonious. That was something interesting to me. Every time I would come across this name, Harmony Hall, there was always something dissonant about the history or the place. So for me, when I was working on the song, it became helpful to think of it as literally a building,

something that represents harmony, the highest ideal of human society, but sometimes inhabited by the worst people in the world. And the stone walls of harmony, all bear witness. Anybody with the word in mind can never forgive the size you thought was dignified. I don't want to live like this. So, you know, it's helpful to have these conversations. it's like, well, what are places that are like a Harmony Hall? And, you know, one of the first things that came up was, well, the White House.

The White House is literally a symbol of American democracy. And this is where it gets funny. I don't want to say, well, yeah, Harmony Hall is the White House. Because that's not how I think about songwriting. But as we started to, like, figure out the logic of the song, it was helpful to think of the White House as an example. And this is pre-Trump, so it's like, you know, it took on added resonance as we were working on it.

But this idea, the White House represents supposedly the things that are great about American democracy. And yet all sorts of knuckleheads have been living in there doing terrible things, long before our current president. So we're talking about a place that represents political power. And then that really helped me to think about the verses. So, you know, if you're talking about power, one verse maybe could be talking about people without power. One versus the people with power. And the way that I think about it pretty simply is that verse one are the people outside the palace walls, the revolutionaries. Now we find ourselves in late December.

I believe that New Year's Eve will be the perfect time for their great surrender. But they don't remember. And then in the next verse, I thought about the person in the palace who is worried and who doesn't understand the logic of the people outside the palace walls. Within the halls of power lies

the nervous heart that beats like a young pretender. Beneath these verbi-clubs, I hide the shameful crooked ends of a money lender because I still remember. I think a lot of people, they specifically wanted to read this song in terms of anti-Semitism because I'm Jewish. And I think anti-Semitism and Zionism and all aspects of Jewish identity certainly fall into this larger rubric that we're talking about, which is about the cycles of power.

That idea of stateless people forming a state and now being seen understandably as they're the powerful ones. They're the ones in the driver's seat. So I wouldn't say the song's particularly about being Jewish, but because I'm a Jewish person, when I'm thinking about the cycles of history, of course it's going to be one of the ones that I think of. I'm Jewish and I'm American, so I'm going to think about American history and I'm going to think about Jewish history, you know, among others. But yeah, so when I think about that phrase, the money lender, it just makes me think about the past and shame and how sometimes people in power, regardless of what their background is or their ethnicity, even though they have more power than they used to because of trauma or shame, sometimes make decisions that are based in fear. In some ways, that's one of the drivers of these kind of vicious cycles that we have as people, is that people are attracted to power often because they're. lacked power at some point in their life. Why wouldn't you be attracted to power if you didn't have it?

But when you've been traumatized and made to feel fearful, it's no surprise that even with power, you're still seeing yourself in a shameful, fearful way. It's a tough combo, power plus fear. So then suddenly I'm thinking about the people outside the palace will then be the people inside the palace, and one day they'll be kicked out. And, you know, so then I was like, okay, now it's all kind of coming together. Anger wants a voice.

Voices want to sing. Singers harmonize Did I can't hear anything. I can't help as a songwriter but to enjoy the double meaning of harmony, people getting along in harmony and music. The arrangement kind of follows the narrative of the lyrics that Ezra created.

And there is also just something funny about a large group of people proudly and triumphantly singing about how they can't hear... The backing vocals are exclusively Danielle Heim and Dave Longhouse. Strath. Ariel and I had already talked and we knew that he was going to be the kind of main producer

on the album. But, you know, we had this kind of like cool understanding like, yeah, I'll go try stuff with different people and then eventually we'll kind of go over it all together. Because I think there's no limit to how many people can be part of an album, you know, whether musicians or producers or something. So I did another version, which I started with Rostam, where one of his cool ideas was to take the piano chords and then have a choir follow the piano. The choir is, I think we just busted out a choir instrument.

That's all it is. The majority of this record was made in this room, which is Ezra and I. A lot of times we were playing around with fake instruments, like software instruments. We were just kind of coming up with ideas for how this arrangement can go, oh, there could be a guitar cello here. That part was actually originally just a guitar sample. And if you can picture what that would sound like on piano, it actually makes more sense.

It's just kind of like moving kind of more of a classical way. And so when we had our friend Greg Lee's come back and play some pedal steel, he just mimicked that guitar synth part. And that's what that was. So at the end, the only piano parts that I don't play, which also are my favorite piano parts are by Tommy King, we just recorded him 10, 15 takes of him just kind of going hard at the end and we picked our favorite ones and they all kind of slot in perfectly in these little moments. Well, he took the songwriting and it added to the element of like a band jamming together,

which is part of what we were going for, some kind of unexplored territory for Vampire Weekend. Right, Vampire Weekend never had any twang. You can go overboard, but it's like for us to sound like Vampire Weeking but have a touch of that. And I think that's why it's important to have other words. players because they're just playing in the vernacular that they know. And the stone walls if I'm in a bad witness, anybody with the word in mind can never

forgive the sight of wicked snakes inside a place you thought was dignified. I don't want to live like this, but I don't want to die. I guess the way that I think about it is if the verses give you different examples of power struggles, the powerless and the powerful. And then the pre-chorus, the anger wants a voice, tells this story about the way that even good intentions can turn sour. You're giving all these examples that are kind of showing sympathy for this struggle of what it means to live in an unfair world, but also a type of fatalism about are we kind of stuck in this like gnarly circle. So what's your conclusion? The conclusion is not obvious. This is like, I don't like

the way I'm living, I don't feel good, and yet I'm not ready to give it all up as a martyr or, you know, I really want to believe in something, and then an example undermines it. It wouldn't be reflective of how I feel or how I see reality to look at all these examples of power struggles and vicious cycles and then end on a chipper note and say, and that's why you can never give up, man. Because that's not what the song is saying. So it's like the statement had to end in that feeling of being trapped between two things, not knowing where that third path is that's going to get you where you want to go. So, yeah, don't want to live like this, but also don't want to die.

So what else is there? I don't know. That's what the song is saying. I don't know what else there is. I don't know what else there is. I don't want to live like this, but I don't want to die, is a bit of an artist's predicament, too, because you can't repeat yourself and you also don't want to give up, so you're forced to find that third path.

Following up your most critically acclaimed album, which our third album was, it's impossible. Nobody ever nails it because you can't repeat that. And then if you deviate from it, you explore new tones or vibes. People are like, well, what happened? You know, it's kind of impossible. But what is possible is to move forward in a way that still feels like you, but still at least lets people know that the story's not over. Here's Harmony Hall by Vampire Weekend in its entirety. Song.

Like a young pretender. Hands of a money lender. Because I still remember. I want to sing. Sinners harmonize. But every time a proud romance, another one begins. And the start. SongExploder.net to learn more about Vampire Weekend.

You'll also find a link to stream or buy this song. Song Exploder is made by me and producer Christian Coons, with production assistance from Olivia Wood and illustrations by Carlos Lerma. Song Exploader is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a collective of independent podcasts, supported by our listeners. You can learn about all of our shows

at Radiotopia.fm. You can find Song Exploder on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at Song Exploder. This marks the end of Year 6 of Song Exploder. We'll be back in January 2020. I'm Rishikes Hirwe. Thanks so much for listening. Radiotopia.