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ezra koenig

@ezraissopretty / ezraissopretty.tumblr.com

just loads of pictures of ezra tbh
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vampire-ezra
I’ve always really had a thing for really simple forms of folk music, whether it’s like Irish ballads or old-school country. I just like simple songs. I went with Ariel to see Kacey Musgraves at the Greek Theater in L.A. [in September 2016]. The thing I loved about it was it wasn’t too loud — I’m definitely becoming a cranky old man — so I could really hear every word. The music was really clear and her voice was really clear. I’m the type of person who has spent hours poring over the avant-garde poetic lyrics of certain songwriters, and there was something that felt so good [about how] from the first verse, you knew who was singing, who they were singing to, what kind of situation they were in. After the show I realized there’s not a ton of Vampire Weekend songs where you could listen to the first verse and immediately answer the question of who’s singing and who are they singing to. I’m proud of the surrealist moments in the Vampire Weekend catalog. I think they have meaning, even if it’s not a very direct type of meaning. A song like “Step” [is] a very wordy song, there’s a million references. But the thing that got me excited about this album was zooming in on simpler, but arguably more complex ideas: What are these songs about? Who are they for? What are they doing? I realized, on a really simple level, I haven’t written a lot of songs that have that type of elegance. There’s a lot of Vampire Weekend songs that have elegance in terms of baroque chords, arrangement, and interesting turns of phrase — but we’ve never had a song as elegant as some of that good country-folk songwriting. One of the things that I’ve always been hard on myself about is not having enough songs that you could play for somebody and they’d immediately know what the song is about. It’s like the elevator-pitch version of the song. I felt like that was an interesting challenge. I cannot say every song rose to that challenge.

Ezra on the direction of LP4  (via vampire-ezra)

#sounds good !
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