“A happy accident”: the breakthrough Vampire Weekend song that Rostam Batmanglij never have finished
When the members of Vampire Weekend first met at Columbia University, their collaboration worked because they had a shared love for a multitude of different styles, namely punk and African music.
Everything about their formation seemed familiar, the type of story you hear at countless universities with people who meet on a whim with a shared love for music. Even their name, which came from a project Ezra Koenig worked on in college after watching the cult classic The Lost Boys, felt reminiscent of those improvisational, humble beginnings.
After studying, they remained committed fully to their music, self-producing their debut album while Keonig worked his day job as an English teacher. An explosive success for a band barely out of the woods with their own studies and respective personal endeavours, the debut record contained many career-defining hits, including ‘Oxford Comma’, ‘A-Punk’, ‘Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa’, and ‘Campus’.
The unique thing about the band wasn’t their positioning in the broader indie revival scene; it was that they seemed plucked from something else entirely, with a distinctive sound that hinged on a brave mix of styles and genres. In many of those earlier songs, you can hear the African, punk rock, and pop influences, but also the presence of other, quirkier facets, blended with traditional tropes, like classical, giving their sound its art-rock edge.
‘Campus’, especially, started as a passion project of Rostam Batmanglij’s, a seed for a song that wasn’t initially intended for anything they would perform, which immediately removed any inhibitions when it came to the lyrics or melody. The idea came from Batmanglij wanting to create something that borrows from the same progressive builds as classical composers, though when it morphed into a Vampire Weekend song, it became its own thing entirely.
Recalling the creation of the song, Batmanglij said he was interested in making something “built around a cello, a kick drum, and a vocal that told a story”. Citing Robyn’s ‘Be Mine’ as a seminal influence, he also said that it just seemed to work the moment they put everything together with rock instruments, adding:
“That was a happy accident, but I always intended for this original version to see the light of day someday.”
Rostam Batmanglij
On its theatrical feel, he went on to say that the riff was “sort of like this classic descending, Bach-thing that was also used by Mark Mothersbaugh in many of his Wes Anderson movies,” adding that he had a specific “vision” for the song that he was working on at the same time that the Vampire Weekend version started to emerge.
As a result, his original version was never actually finished, and he only officially released the version as he initially intended recently, showing the song in a much different light from the version you hear on the record. Cinematic in atmosphere, the original ‘Campus’ focuses on the emotional core of the song, stripping away its embellishments and appearing rawer and more vulnerable in tone.
That clean, gritty atmosphere is precisely what makes this version of ‘Campus’ so resonant, as it focuses more on the visceral experience of the song itself, independent of all of those distinctive Vampire Weekend flavourings. It also creates a more expansive landscape that goes back to their origins, painting a distinctive picture of that familiar adolescent angst on a university campus.
