“I was there”: Ezra Koenig on first hearing ‘The Rat’ by The Walkmen
Deep in the bowels of the Bowery Ballroom, a sweat-stained garage of a venue in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, The Walkmen’s frontman Hamilton Leithauser struts up to the microphone. He announces a brand new song the band has never played before, just for the throng of 500 packed inside. It’s called ‘Girls at Night’.
Looking up at him in awe is an 18-year-old Columbia University freshman a week or two into college life, who would go on to become one of the foremost singer-songwriters of his generation.
“It was this really dramatic song with these crazy drums,” Ezra Koenig, the de facto leader of Vampire Weekend, would later tell Pitchfork. Indeed, those crazy drums would inspire many indie rock powerhouses, from Bloc Party’s Matt Tong to Matt Helders of the Arctic Monkeys.
Back then, though, in September 2002, the really dramatic song wasn’t ready to be let out into the world. It was reserved for live performances; otherwise, it was trapped in a grainy demo file that only the most avid Walkmen fanatics could track down.
“We just kept searching ‘Girls at Night’,” explained Koenig during a 2012 interview with Leithauser. The trial-and-error Google searches initially didn’t yield anything, but he and his Columbia friends didn’t give up.
Eventually, they found what they were looking for on the peer-to-peer network SoulSeek. “So on my old computer I have an MP3 from minimum six months before Bows + Arrows [The Walkmen’s sophomore studio album] came out.” Koenig could barely contain his pride at this mark of true fandom.
Over the next year, after pestering for long enough via email, he managed to get an internship with the band at their recording studio, Marcata, in Harlem. He will have sat in on many of the recordings which made it onto Bows + Arrows. But apparently not the song ‘Girls at Night’.
Koenig had to bide his time again. “I was waiting a year for the recording of it to come out.” By the time it did on April 19th, 2004, he was in his 20s. And he didn’t recognise the name. Discarding ‘Girls at Night’, the band had given the song a new name, befitting its relentless, guttural intensity. “It was ‘The Rat’.”
Recalling the sound of the demo file he chanced upon, Koenig called it “a totally different recording” from the finished song, which was released as the lead single from Bows + Arrows.
The drama and crazy drums of that very first Bowery performance remain, though. Etched into post-punk folklore, and forever binding two of the foremost New York bands of the 21st century.
“I always tell people I was there the first time you played ‘The Rat’,” Koenig told Leithauser. “I bet,” replied his fellow frontman. “That would be right around when we had written the song.” Little could his band have known at the time the butterfly effect that a songwriting session would have.
Listen to ‘The Rat’ by The Walkmen below.
