Other songs on “American Stories” are more personal. “Like a Spark” opens with a blues riff played on a nylon-string guitar, offset by the appearance of a saz, a long-necked Turkish lute that’s omnipresent in Middle Eastern music. The combination is dizzying, but lovely. “At some point, I started bringing in pedal steel, and that stuff and the Persian stuff started living next to each other,” Batmanglij told me. “That was the tipping point for me, where I was, like, ‘Oh, this record, it could be both your most American record and your most Persian record.’ ”
The album reiterates the argument that almost all American music is a hybrid of sorts, and that every American story is also a story about someplace else. The idea of self-creation feels central to the record’s gestalt. “A thing I think about is, What is American music? What makes music sound American?” he said. “With pedal steel, if we’re to believe the origin story, that’s a Hawaiian instrument. And yet we think of it as Southern. It has such a strange beauty.” He carries that sense of expansiveness and possibility to other facets of his life. “Sometimes the words mean what you like,” he sings on “Back of a Truck,” a jangly breakup song about ripping down the interstate.
“I think melody can be important, and the same lyric could mean different things in a different melodic context,” Batmanglij said. “I would even say that the same lyric could mean different things in a different harmonic context.” Though he’s fluent in music theory, he still values spontaneity and uncertainty. “I try to forget about it when I’m making music,” he said of his classical education.
At times, he can’t help himself. A new song called “Hardy” features a guest verse from Clairo and a sample of the French composer Georges Delerue’s “Chorale,” from the film “Day for Night” (1973), performed by Hugh Wolff and the London Sinfonietta. The strings are jubilant and hyperkinetic; Batmanglij’s voice is gritty with resignation. Sounds can be recontextualized; love can transform. “I loved you, honey, and you loved me as much,” he sings. “Don’t feel bad we couldn’t have another year.”
Batmanglij left Vampire Weekend after the release of “Modern Vampires of the City,” the group’s third album, and its second to début at No. 1 on the Billboard chart. (“Modern Vampires” was named the best album of 2013 by both Pitchfork and Rolling Stone, and it won the Grammy for Best Alternative Music Album; Batmanglij co-produced it with Ariel Rechtshaid.) The band seemed primed for enormous success; by any metric, it was a bold time for someone to split. “I was very committed to that life until I was thirty, when I pressed the Reset button on everything,” Batmanglij said. “I moved to L.A., I left Vampire Weekend. I had this opportunity to restart, and I took it.”
In recent months, Batmanglij has been posting short videos to his YouTube channel, talking about the process of writing and recording “American Stories” and offering revelatory details about a few old Vampire Weekend tracks. (His discussion of “Campus,” a beloved cut from the band’s self-titled début, highlights the ways that the vocalist Ezra Koenig’s slightly wilder, more improvisational style balanced Batmanglij’s erudition and exactness.) “Someone commented on this video I posted, ‘I loved your music for years, and I grew up listening to Vampire Weekend. I had no idea you were in Vampire Weekend,’ ” he said. “And I responded, ‘That’s probably because I haven’t talked about Vampire Weekend publicly for ten years.’ There’s a new context, I think, to revisit some of those old stories. I think enough time has passed.”
I told him that the pockets of nostalgia on the new album felt interconnected to me, even if the sources were different—an old band, a past love affair, a sense that the world used to be at least slightly less heinous and terrifying than it is now. “I think they’re different for me,” he said, laughing. He sees his solo music as a way of arriving somewhere new. “When I work as a producer, I feel an obligation to get to the end of the process, because ultimately that’s what the producer is there to do,” he said. “When I’m making a Rostam album, I want to get lost. I don’t really wanna know exactly where I’m going.” “American Stories” has a curious, journeying quality—it seems less interested in conclusions or codas than in forgiveness and the slow accumulation of knowledge. This, too, feels fundamental to an American life: the capacity to take a wrong turn but just keep going. ♦
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