Why Vampire Weekend gave a song to the ‘Twilight’ soundtrack
The name of the indie rock group known as Vampire Weekend didn’t have anything to do with any pre-existing intellectual property. During his stint at Columbia University, frontman Ezra Koenig helped produce the beginnings of a short film about vampires taking over a prominent Cape Cod town. While the film never came to fruition, its title and some of its themes eventually found their way into what would become Koenig’s alternative life path as a musician in Vampire Weekend.
Koenig probably couldn’t have imagined the cultural explosion of vampires that was to come in the following years. Everything from television shows like True Blood to video games like Castlevania kickstarted a major trend, but nothing had the same impact that the Twilight film series did. A billion-dollar film series, Twilight became an unprecedented phenomenon right around the time Koenig and his bandmates were becoming major players in the indie rock scene.
“People have asked us, ‘Do you feel like you predicted the vampire trend by naming your band? We said, ‘no no no’,” Koenig told NME around the release of the third film, Eclipse. “But, as time’s gone on, the best thing we could do is embrace it.”
That’s why, when asked by the film’s creative to contribute a song to the Eclipse soundtrack, Vampire Weekend agreed. The series had already managed to rope in some major indie rock stars, including Metric, St. Vincent, Thom Yorke, and Band of Horses, plus mainstream artists like The Black Keys, Sia, Cee Lo Green, and Linkin Park. Vampire Weekend was just the latest in a long line of artists willing to put their names on the most popular film series of the time.
‘Jonathan Low’ probably isn’t the most notable Vampire Weekend song of all time. It does fit right in with the Twilight series, with lyrics that pertain to killings, violence, and other gothic themes. The titular character also doesn’t seem to point to a real person or a character from the Twilight series but rather acts as a way for Vampire Weekend to connect themselves to their task at hand.
The band certainly didn’t see much in ‘Jonathan Low’: the song has only played nine times in total, all in 2019, nearly a full decade after the song’s original release. To Koenig, it was just an in-between release for fans to enjoy before their next album. “When it comes to our own album, it’s a laborious process,” Koenig explained. “Things like this are a low-pressure chance to do something different.”
Check out ‘Jonathan Low’ down below.
