SOUNDTRACK: ROSTAM-Tiny Desk (Home) Concert #221 (June 8, 2021).
Rostam Batmanglij was a founding member of Vampire Weekend and I was really quite bummed when he left (it was on good terms, apparently).
I assumed that his solo music would be very different from Vampire Weekend, but I never thought it would sound like this folkie sit-in.
Rostam and a group of backing musicians play two cuts from … Changephobia, a collection of songs that simultaneously look to the past and the future.
They opens with the
relatively breezy, escapist ballad “4Runner.” It opens with Julian McClanahan Calvert on mandolin and Logan Kane on upright bass. Conor Malloy plays some cool muted drums (with brushes) as Rostam sings in his soft croon. Rostam himself doesn’t start playing the guitar until almost half way through before he jumps on the harmonica.
The band is sitting ion a circle with the camera on a track around them
My great-grandmother always used to say, “Life is a train. People get on. People get off.” And it just keeps going. Watching Rostam’s Tiny Desk performance, it’s easy to imagine you’re on that life-train, traveling around and around, catching glimpses of instruments and faces as they pass by, before coming back where you started. It’s a clever, if sometimes dizzying nod to the overarching themes of Rostam’s Changephobia.
For the reflective “These Kids We Knew,” Benji Lysagh starts the song with guitar. McClanahan Calvert has switched to guitar as well. Rostam plays a few lead licks, which are more of a nice riff for the song than anything approximating a solo. Henry Solomon switches from congas to harmonica for this song.
The group closes with “In a River,” a one-off single from 2018 that sits perfectly alongside the newer songs as he recalls a warm night skinny dipping with a friend.
“In a River” opens with Julian McClanahan Calvert on mandolin. Solomon adds some deep bass notes from his drum pads. As the song nears the end, Rostam whoops, Benji Lysaght plays a quiet solo in the middle and Logan Kane bows the upright bass.
The setting feels perfect for a song like this. If only the candles were a campfire.
[READ: July 1, 2021] “Observed and Observing, That’s Him”
This month’s issue of The Walrus is the Summer Reading issue and features three pieces of fiction and three poems.
The fourth piece is a poem. It reads a bit like flash fiction, but it’s really good, even with the odd title.
It begins with a man on a roof doing repairs.
I love the way the story describes him from “the glances from the backyard across the street.” He is a shambles of a man with holes in his clothes. And while on that ladder, he looks like a man “barely hanging on.”
The people in the backyard are there for a wedding “COVID style.”
The point of view shifts to his from the roof as he observes the wedding. They are trying to ignore the dark sky, trying to manage “their masks in the unforgiving wind.”
A few moments earlier the groom mother’s had asked him to stop working. But of course, he needs to finish before the rain came as well.
However, special occasions are rare in times like these.
And the final lines:
looking down
on all that
hope
is wonderful.
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