Vampire Weekend: Born out of our very own Morningside Heights

A deep dive into the formative years of Vampire Weekend and the ways in which their undergraduate encounters molded the band into what it is today.

Photography by Merielen Espino/The Barnard Bulletin

By Jem Hanan

October 29, 2024

With a fifth studio album recently released after six years of silence and the “Only God Was Above Us” tour well underway, Vampire Weekend has been effectively thrust back into the cultural limelight. Now a five-time Grammy nominated and two-time winning group, it is safe to assume that the members of the indie-rock-ska-pop-alternative-etc-etc band have far surpassed their humbler origins. However, that is not to say these origins don’t bear repeating, particularly for our student body. After all, Vampire Weekend’s genesis occurred right here on our capital-c “Campus,” and their mythos is steeped in Morningside Heights. 

Vampire Weekend originally consisted of four members: vocalist/guitarist Ezra Koenig (CC ‘06), bassist Chris Baio (CC ‘07), drummer Chris Tomson (CC ‘06), and vocalist/instrumentalist Rostam Batmanglij (CC ‘06), although Batmanglij left the band a few years after the release of their fourth album. The four met in typical college fashion, with Koenig and Batmanglij having met at a party in their freshman year, Batmanglij and Tomson in a diatonic theory class (they were both music majors), and Baio and Koenig as suitemates in the latter’s sophomore year. However, the four wouldn’t officially perform together until their senior year, when they competed in a battle of the bands within the walls of Lerner Hall. They placed third out of four participating bands. 

Many of Vampire Weekend’s first performances together took place in frat houses around campus. In fact, the album cover of their first album is a Polaroid picture taken at one of their early performances in St. Anthony Hall. Some tracks from their first album and most of the original six-song EP were recorded in the Columbia dorms and music rooms. As some demos from the EP began to gain traction online from popular music blogs during and after their senior year, it was clear that the undergrads had hit something big. 

Many of the band members’ involvement in campus clubs and student life gave way to the foundational beginnings of Vampire Weekend. Baio was notably the rock director at WBAR, Barnard College’s freeform radio station, and cites his time there as experience that helped him book Vampire Weekend’s first tour. Across the street, Tomson worked alongside those at WKCR, Columbia’s radio station, where he said in an interview with Rolling Stone that he was introduced to a vast pool of musical influences because of the station’s African show and immensely diverse library. Batmanglij’s interest in classical music was cultivated in the classes he took for his music major, which can clearly be heard in the harpsichord harmonies and cello melodies sprinkled throughout the first album. 

Where the group’s Columbia upbringing truly takes center stage, however, is in the song lyrics, most of which can be attributed to Koenig. An English and creative writing major, Koenig evidently had a penchant for storytelling. In his senior year, a short story of his titled “Off The Grid” was published in the university's creative writing magazine, Quarto. Even the band’s name itself originated from the title of a film Koenig started writing in the summer going into his sophomore year, featuring a main character named Walcott. Sound familiar? 

With a fascination for all things preppy — aesthetically, historically, and philosophically — much of Koenig’s writing during his time at Columbia centered on East Coast elite proclivities, expensive fabrics, and colonization. In Vampire Weekend’s self-titled album, this manifests in songs like “M79,” with lines like “dress yourself in bleeding madras,” or in “The Kids Don’t Stand A Chance,” which critiques the colonization fundamental to privilege. In some ways, Koenig embodied this fixation, with many college-era photos featuring Koenig in a Lacoste button-down, collar perpetually popped. 

The culmination of this interest was a collection of short stories by Koenig titled “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa.” If the title didn’t give it away, these stories are what much of the music on Vampire Weekend’s self-titled album was based upon. Although these stories will most likely remain unpublished, there are a lucky few who have gotten to read the foundational text behind the group’s iconic orange-hued album, one of them being novelist and current Barnard Professor, Elif Batuman. In April of 2008, she published an article in The Guardian detailing the experience: 

In 2006, when I was a depressed graduate, I published an essay in n+1 magazine about the American short story…Shortly after the essay was published, I received an email from a recent Columbia graduate called Ezra Koenig, to the effect that these words "really resonated" with him: would I mind sending him my address, so that he could mail me some short stories he had written in a creative-writing workshop?

…the stories — for which, in all honesty, I did not have very high hopes — were accompanied by a self-produced CD of related songs performed by Koenig's band, Vampire Weekend.

The stories were stapled in a homemade booklet, entitled Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa; the cover art was a photo collage of shirts and sweaters, clipped from a J Crew catalogue (Orange Coral, Tangerine Heather, Harbor). Enclosed with the sky-blue CD was a charming note, handwritten on a small square of lined paper that appeared to have been cut, thriftily, from a larger piece of lined paper.

In the article is a link to a blog Koenig kept during his senior year at Columbia, “Internet Vibes,” that only further illustrates the ways in which his time at the university and in Morningside Heights informed his songwriting and storytelling. For example, he writes of a trip he took with his girlfriend at the time to visit her family in Haridwar, India, and his nuanced observations of the place, the people, and, of course, the vibes. In many of the first album’s songs, there are references to places in India, such as Darjeeling in “One (Blake's Got a New Face)” and Dharamsala in “Oxford Comma.” Yes, these references harken back to the emphasis on the nature of colonization in much of Koenig’s earlier writing, but they were also likely inspired by his time traveling there. 

Koenig's time at Columbia cultivated these questions of privilege and prep that then permeated much of his storytelling from that era. The members’ clubs, classes, and access to campus facilities shaped the band as we know it today. With this context in mind, lines like “I see a Mansard Roof through the trees,” “You walk up the stairs, see the French kids by the door,” or “Sing ‘Next year in Jerusalem’/You know, the one at 103rd and Broadway?” aren’t just tongue-in-cheek references to the members’ alma mater; rather, they are indications of Vampire Weekend’s continued acknowledgment of the most influential era for the band — their college years. That is not to discount the past and future experiences of Koenig, Tomson, Baio, and Batmanglij but rather to serve as a testament to us current students — walking the same cobbled paths, partaking in the same clubs, and passing the same neighborhood staples as Vampire Weekend once did — of the incredible art that can be forged out of our time here.