<\/p>\n
Other songs on \u201cAmerican Stories\u201d are more personal. \u201cLike a Spark\u201d opens with a blues riff played on a nylon-string guitar, offset by the appearance of a saz, a long-necked Turkish lute that\u2019s omnipresent in Middle Eastern music. The combination is dizzying, but lovely. \u201cAt some point, I started bringing in pedal steel, and that stuff and the Persian stuff started living next to each other,\u201d Batmanglij told me. \u201cThat was the tipping point for me, where I was, like, \u2018Oh, this record, it could be both your most American record and your most Persian record.\u2019\u00a0\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019s gestalt. \u201cA thing I think about is, What is American music? What makes music sound American?\u201d he said. \u201cWith pedal steel, if we\u2019re to believe the origin story, that\u2019s a Hawaiian instrument. And yet we think of it as Southern. It has such a strange beauty.\u201d He carries that sense of expansiveness and possibility to other facets of his life. \u201cSometimes the words mean what you like,\u201d he sings on \u201cBack of a Truck,\u201d a jangly breakup song about ripping down the interstate.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think melody can be important, and the same lyric could mean different things in a different melodic context,\u201d Batmanglij said. \u201cI would even say that the same lyric could mean different things in a different harmonic context.\u201d Though he\u2019s fluent in music theory, he still values spontaneity and uncertainty. \u201cI try to forget about it when I\u2019m making music,\u201d he said of his classical education.<\/p>\n
At times, he can\u2019t help himself. A new song called \u201cHardy\u201d features a guest verse from Clairo and a sample of the French composer Georges Delerue\u2019s \u201cChorale,\u201d from the film \u201cDay for Night\u201d (1973), performed by Hugh Wolff and the London Sinfonietta. The strings are jubilant and hyperkinetic; Batmanglij\u2019s voice is gritty with resignation. Sounds can be recontextualized; love can transform. \u201cI loved you, honey, and you loved me as much,\u201d he sings. \u201cDon\u2019t feel bad we couldn\u2019t have another year.\u201d<\/p>\n
Batmanglij left Vampire Weekend after the release of \u201cModern Vampires of the City,\u201d the group\u2019s third album, and its second to d\u00e9but at No.\u00a01 on the Billboard<\/em> chart. (\u201cModern Vampires\u201d was named the best album of 2013 by both Pitchfork<\/em> and Rolling Stone<\/em>, 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. \u201cI was very committed to that life until I was thirty, when I pressed the Reset button on everything,\u201d Batmanglij said. \u201cI moved to L.A., I left Vampire Weekend. I had this opportunity to restart, and I took it.\u201d<\/p>\n In recent months, Batmanglij has been posting short videos to his YouTube channel, talking about the process of writing and recording \u201cAmerican Stories\u201d and offering revelatory details about a few old Vampire Weekend tracks. (His discussion of \u201cCampus,\u201d a beloved cut from the band\u2019s self-titled d\u00e9but, highlights the ways that the vocalist Ezra Koenig\u2019s slightly wilder, more improvisational style balanced Batmanglij\u2019s erudition and exactness.) \u201cSomeone commented on this video I posted, \u2018I loved your music for years, and I grew up listening to Vampire Weekend. I had no idea you were in Vampire Weekend,\u2019\u00a0\u201d he said. \u201cAnd I responded, \u2018That\u2019s probably because I haven\u2019t talked about Vampire Weekend publicly for ten years.\u2019 There\u2019s a new context, I think, to revisit some of those old stories. I think enough time has passed.\u201d<\/p>\n I told him that the pockets of nostalgia on the new album felt interconnected to me, even if the sources were different\u2014an 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. \u201cI think they\u2019re different for me,\u201d he said, laughing. He sees his solo music as a way of arriving somewhere new. \u201cWhen I work as a producer, I feel an obligation to get to the end of the process, because ultimately that\u2019s what the producer is there to do,\u201d he said. \u201cWhen I\u2019m making a Rostam album, I want to get lost. I don\u2019t really wanna know exactly where I\u2019m going.\u201d \u201cAmerican Stories\u201d has a curious, journeying quality\u2014it 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.\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.newyorker.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Other songs on \u201cAmerican Stories\u201d are more personal. \u201cLike a Spark\u201d opens with a blues riff played on a nylon-string guitar, offset by the appearance of a saz, a long-necked Turkish lute that\u2019s omnipresent in Middle Eastern music. The combination is dizzying, but lovely. \u201cAt some point, I started bringing in pedal steel, and that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2419073,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25179],"tags":[423140,22008,23083,362131],"class_list":["post-2419072","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music","tag-inverted","tag-magazine","tag-pop-music","tag-splitscreenimagerightinset"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Rostam-Batmanglij-Wanders-to-the-Edges-of-American-Sound.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2419072","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2419072"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2419072\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2419074,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2419072\/revisions\/2419074"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2419073"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2419072"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2419072"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2419072"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}