Tag: vampire-weekend

Sympathy, by Vampire Weekend.

For the first time in this project, I am not recording this on the day I publish it. Sorry. On my first work trip in like 20 months, and although it would be plausibly to drag the acoustic around on airplanes — or just the MIDI keyboard, more sensibly — I don’t need the extra stress of fitting this into a schedule I don’t have lots of control over, and, well, there will be actual human beings around, so I should spend time with them.

This song is the first of three I’m recording ahead of time, so I put some extra effort in. Hope you like.

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Who doesn’t love a song that provides the opportunity to explain Diego Garcia (the island) to your kids? Did I tell them I once knew an ex-Navy guy who referred to it as “Diego Gar-toilet?” Yes. Yes, I did. I’m sure it’s lovely.

Walcott, by Vampire Weekend.

Is this song Vampire Weekend’s most punk number? Except that it’s about Cape Cod? We’re headed to the beach on vacation, but nobody writes songs about the Outer Banks. Hmm, well, maybe there are pirate songs about Cape Hatteras? Probably.

This happened today because the 14-year-old and I were listening to VW in the car back and forth to the grocery store, and I decided I would try a totally different, much more recent song, and there were too many hard barre chords, and my wrist wasn’t up for it, so I went through all their songs alphabetically and tried a bunch of stuff until I got to the letter W.

Holiday, by Vampire Weekend.

Happy Summer, people.

This song is one of my favorite singalongs in the car, but also I remember hearing it in a Bed, Bath, and Beyond when we were still kinda new to listening to Vampire Weekend, and the song wasn’t that old, and it was kinda like, is this pop music now? It was confusing.

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Come for the first day of summer; stay to hear me mess up my favorite line, while also doing some odd things to the melody because, uh, this song is like in a key I love, but an octave high for me, I think?

The rhythmic knocking is my index finger smashing into the edge of the noise hole or whatever it’s called on my guitar and once it happens four times in a row, you’re kinda pot committed on this sort of thing, so I did my best to keep it up.

Campus, by Vampire Weekend.

This song is for my daughter on her 14th birthday. It’s one of her favorites, and whenever we “jam” together (kinda), we like to sing along to this one.

I was not sure I could play the extremely basic G major scale run and sing at the same time, and even this mediocre-but-complete edition would’ve absolutely disgusted my guitar teacher from 1990 who would’ve tossed his hair back, shaken his head, mumbled something about Steely Dan, and told me to practice that goddamn scale exercise for an hour a day or don’t bother having him over next week.

Reader, I did not practice it enough.

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How sparse is the original of this? I think it’s pretty sparse, frankly, maybe sparser than this. I added a bass to the guitar, a strategically placed backup vocal, and a little bit of a third guitar strumming the chords in one of the bits.

Hannah Hunt, by Vampire Weekend.

There are three bands that the whole family can get behind — and that the whole family has seen live — and one of them is Vampire Weekend. This song off their third album holds some quiet meaning for me like the rest of that 2013 record with all its foreboding, as if they knew what might come next.

My most vivid memory of listening to this album alone was in the car on a long drive back from the USMNT-Germany match at RFK that June, during a dark time at home, when we had our own warnings and rumblings afoot, and I had this thing on repeat for hours.

When this album came out, it was at the peak of my interest in (what was then called Rap) Genius, and I still get notifications about my notes on the lyrics to some of these songs. Annotate the web! What could go wrong.

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Mostly guitars here, but I couldn’t resist a little MIDI marimba and then was looking for a spot to drop a beat and realized there’s a spot for that when it gets “loud” at the end.