Rostam Batmanglij Wanders to the Edges of American Sound
This month, Rostam Batmanglij will release “American Stories,” his third solo record since leaving Vampire Weekend, the rock band he helped form in 2006, when he was an undergraduate studying classical music at Columbia University. Batmanglij, who records under his first name, was born to Iranian parents in Washington, D.C. In the past two decades, he has built an enviable career as a polymath producer and multi-instrumentalist, making visionary, searching pop songs for a roster of indie-leaning artists, including Clairo, Maggie Rogers, and Haim, as well as cult favorites like Carly Rae Jepsen and Charli XCX. (Batmanglij, who is queer, has also worked with Frank Ocean; he arranged and produced the distorted, quivery guitar on “Ivy,” perhaps the most poignant and incandescent song on “Blonde.”) “There is a desire to push the form—to push what can be in a pop song,” he told me recently. His production style is verdant but gentle: sticky percussion, a dreamy mix of acoustic and synthesized instruments, layers, mystery. He is exceptionally good at drawing something raw and unmediated out of a vocalist. For a listener, this can feel like stumbling into a room where something interesting is happening. Throughout the past ten years, especially, that sound—breathy, close, a little woozy—has become synonymous with a certain artful, confessional, cool-girl aesthetic.
As a solo artist, Batmanglij writes in a style that is baroque and sophisticated, and lightly warped in a way that recalls both Paul Simon and Radiohead. “American Stories” is a lush and thoughtful album about an evanescent romance and the ephemeral, sometimes flashing nature of love. On the chorus of “Like a Spark,” the record’s first single, Batmanglij sings of trying to excise any possessiveness from his feelings of devotion:
This spring, Batmanglij has been finishing renovations on a recording studio in Manhattan’s Chinatown, and one recent afternoon we met there to talk. The space is airy and blank: white walls, blond wood, sunbeams. We removed our shoes. In conversation, Batmanglij is attentive and soft-spoken, and generally adheres to a philosophy of saying less. I began to tell him that I found the new record rich with a kind of muted sadness, but, midway through the thought, I trailed off. “You can say it,” he offered, laughing.
“There’s heartbreak here,” I finished.
“Yeah,” he said. “That’s a thread of the record. Or, I don’t know if ‘heartbreak’ is the right word. It’s disappointment, perhaps. What do we do when a relationship ends? How do we feel about that era of our lives?”
“American Stories” consists of just nine songs, and clocks in at around thirty minutes. The last few tracks on the record take a political turn, especially “The Weight,” which seems to address the pro-Palestine encampments and associated arrests at his alma mater. (“Eyes glowing in the heat lamps / Calling out a broken government,” he sings.) Batmanglij cited Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s election as a moment that made him rethink the contours of the future: “I started to feel a lot of hope, actually, about the American project.” He added, “I think all art has an inherent politics. A friend of mine said, ‘Well, an artist should just be able to make something that they think is beautiful.’ I don’t know if I agree. But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t like making beautiful things.”
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. ♦