Web extra interview: Vampire Weekend's Ezra Koenig

(CBS News) Ezra Koenig grew up in various New York City neighborhoods before relocating to suburban New Jersey, where he developed his musical interests, leading to the formation (with three college friends) of the band Vampire Weekend.

In this extended web-exclusive interview Koenig sat down with Anthony Mason to discuss his evolution from a music fan to a musician with a "job."

Anthony Mason: "When did your interest in music start?"

Ezra Koenig: "I was always interested in music. I always grew up listening to a lot of music, playing music, even writing songs a little bit. And then the first time I was in a band, I was probably 13. So I've had bands kind of on and off since I was around that age when I first got a guitar."

Mason: "When you signed up to be in a band at 13, what were you thinking?"

Koenig: "Well, surprisingly for that age, we had a fairly specific agenda. We only had one original song. That was called 'The Beast From the Sea,' and it was this surfy-type song. And I think it's 'cause the amp I had had built-in reverb, so I was very fascinated by that.

"I think the reason that we formed was to play at our seventh-grade graduation. It was a bunch of friends, most of whom I'm still in touch with today, most of whom are still musicians. And then we covered a U2 song, something like that."

Mason: "So the stated goal of this band was to play at seventh-grade graduation. Did you get there?"

Koenig: "Yeah, we did it. And there's a video, we did decently. From there we started writing and recording a lot. All throughout high school, my best friend, Wes [Miles], who is now in a band called Ra Ra Riot, we would always hang out and we'd always have bands. And his dad had a bunch of recording equipment, so we made, like, hundreds of weirdo recordings down in the basement. So recording was always kind of part of -- we'd always be making albums back then! (laughs)"

Mason: "How unhip now. (laughs) It's amazing that you found this group of musicians that young."

Koenig: "Yeah. And also, you know, considering that we grew up in a tiny suburban New Jersey town. It's only about 7,000 people. Our graduating high school class was 86. I think it's the smallest high school in New Jersey. But there were a bunch of us who more or less liked the same type of music and were kind of fascinated by starting bands and the other things that have to do with being in a band, taking our own press pictures -- not that there's any press (laughs), but you know, doing that type of thing."

Mason: "So it sounds like you were pretty serious about this, in a way, from the beginning."

Koenig: "Yeah. It was a serious hobby for us. We enjoyed spending our weekends and free time doing that. This is kind of early Internet, this is still AOL days, so there wasn't that much that we could do with our music. We would burn a lot of CD-Rs and we'd play shows and sell them for, like, a few dollars. So there's a tiny little scene in the Essex County area."

Mason: "The Essex County music scene! Were you even thinking at that point that you wanted to be a musician?"

Koenig: "Well, I guess I already considered myself a musician in some funny way. And then of course, being in high school, I never felt 100 percent dedicated to this idea that I'm going to be a professional musician, 'cause I was having fun making music. I was interested in other things. When I applied to Columbia, I wrote that I wanted to major in evolutionary biology. And I really did, I wasn't kidding. I really did enjoy biology in high school.

"And so music kind of just felt like a part of the bigger picture. I was excited to go to college and kind of figure things out."

Mason: "Based on what you're telling me, it doesn't feel accidental, but it wasn't necessarily where you thought you were headed."

Koenig: "I always knew music would be a part of my life, but maybe because my parents are kind of artsy types who didn't end up doing it professionally, I've had this kind of thing hanging over my head about, take your artistic passion seriously, but kind of keep it real, in terms of the fact that, you know, you're going to have to get a job, you're going to have to make a living. So I had both of those thoughts in my mind all the time. And I find that there's something nice about having a professional career in music as an accidental situation, because if you ever start to think that it's something that you deserve or that's purely the result of hard work, it's a little bit too crazy because there's so much more at play."

Mason: "What do you mean?"

Koenig: "Well, I remember once I had an internship at a record company in New Jersey, 'cause I was interested in music as a thing. I didn't know if I'd be a musician or maybe a journalist or work at a label. And they didn't have that much for me to do, so they would just give me the demo pile to listen to.

"And at first I was very excited by that. I didn't realize that that's probably the worst thing that people at a label would ever have to do -- and most people at labels don't do that, you know? But I was a teenager, so I was excited about it."

Mason: "That's before you knew how much garbage there was out there? (laughs)"

Koenig: "Right, so I was really excited about it. But I just kept listening to demo after demo, and there's something about the sheer number of the demos that really started to depress me. And I just realized, you know, everything was somebody's passion and somebody's ideas and hard work, contained on that CD. But then when you just look at the sheer number of them in a giant box in an office somewhere in Hoboken, it can be stressful.

"So there's something good about kind of not thinking about all that and just kind of focusing on the fact that you like music, yes. You try to get it out to people and you do your best, and everything else is maybe a little bit accidental. Maybe this is just, like, a psychological -- "

Mason: "Well, I can imagine that bin was kind of imposing when you realized there were all these people with all these ideas, and where does yours fit in? But if you think about that, you'll just not get up, and not do it, I suppose."

Koenig: "Right. I've always been too self-conscious. I think I was too self-conscious to ever say, I'm gonna be a musician and I'm gonna have a band and I believe in myself and we can do anything, 'cause believing in yourself doesn't mean that you're guaranteed anything.

"The truth is, Vampire Weekend started in a fairly casual way. Everybody took music very seriously, but our initial ambition was not to be a big band. Our initial ambition was to pursue some ideas that we had. And maybe that's the important thing. If you can just psych yourself up about your creative ambitions and not worry about the commercial or career ambitions, then you'll be okay. You won't disappoint yourself probably."

Mason: "What were the ideas you were trying to pursue?"

Koenig: "I mean we had a bunch of ideas. One of them was to kind of incorporate a certain type of, you know, African pop guitar tone into a New Wavy, Squeeze, Elvis Costello style of songwriting. It's funny to say that now. It seems very distant, but that was how it felt at the time.

"Incorporating classical music into what we were doing, something that Rostam and I both bonded over, and especially him with his kind of compositional background brought a lot to the table on the first album in that regard. And then even, the idea of the way we dressed, kind of bringing that into the mix of the band.

"Those were all things that we were excited about. I was doing creative writing [in] school. So, everybody was kind of just excited about ideas and it all kind of came together in the band."

Mason: "Those are kind of unusual ideas, and it seems to me interesting that you found three other guys who were all sort of on board with them."

Koenig: "Yeah, well, everybody was on board to the right extent. I think in a band, if everybody has the exact same ideas, nothing's really going to happen. It's all about having enough common ground. And maybe that's why it's good that we were already friends and we'd already worked on music, that we kind of knew each other. Maybe we knew each other's strengths, and we had the right amount of difference to work together."

Mason: "How did you and Rostam meet?"

Koenig: "I think we officially met at a party, but we'd see each other around. He was friends with some people in my dorm. But I do specifically remember the first time we really talked. It was towards the end of our freshman year. And we talked about music. And we did say, oh, maybe we should start a band. But that happens throughout your freshman year -- you're constantly meeting other musicians and being, like, Oh, we should start a band. Partially because you're so desperate to make friends. You're so scared of showing up at college and not meeting anybody, so there's a lot of talk about starting bands. Sometimes you settle for somebody who just happens to have a guitar just because you're happy that you met somebody who's interested in music, period.

But with Rostam, we did have some shared tastes. I remember we both liked Radiohead and we talked about that. And he was already really into writing songs and recording, so I remember going over to his dorm and actually, probably around that time I remember I had recently started writing the song, "Bryn," which ended up being on our first album. And I mentioned that to him and he's like, 'Oh, we should record a version of it in my room.' He had all this recording gear and all these instruments spread out all over the place. I was really impressed by it, and also just how excited he was about just writing songs and recording them. That's what he did with his free time.

"So even though maybe it took us a while to get on the same page in terms of how we could work together creatively or how we could come together aesthetically, there was already something about his attitude that felt kind of similar to mine. Like, just kind of an excitement about songwriting and making recordings, which not everybody that I met had."

Mason: "And did that develop pretty quickly, the connection you guys had? Or was it just a gradual thing?"

Koenig: "It was pretty quick. I mean, well, I guess it was gradual, in the sense that we didn't immediately start a band and start playing shows and writing songs. So, over a few years, I think we honed it.

"You know, Rostam would work on his stuff. C.T. [Chris Tomson] was also playing music. [Chris] Baio was doing his thing. So everybody was kind of working separately, but there were times where we'd kind of come together to work on things. And probably more importantly than that, just a lot of hanging out and talking about music."

Mason: "The reception to your music was pretty quick. Were you surprised at how quickly things seemed to take off?"

Koenig: "Yes, ultimately I was surprised by how quickly things happened. I guess we were also the beneficiaries -- and partially the victims -- of the kind of explosion of Internet music culture, which you know, had been happening for years already, but there was something around that time, 2006, 2007, that people really started talking about blogs as if they were this brand new thing.

And people started talking about the dissemination of music on the Internet in kind of a new way. So that definitely was part of the story. I remember the first time anybody wrote about us was on this e-mail list called Flavor Pill, where they would send people an e-mail about things that were going on in the city. And really, once somebody had mentioned our name there, we started seeing strangers at the shows, started getting little write-ups here and there. And from there, it did happen pretty quickly."

Mason: "You said you were the beneficiary and the victim?"

Koenig: "Yeah."

Mason: "How did you see yourself as a victim of it?"

Koenig: "This is something that people talked about a lot at the time. When people hear your first recordings very quickly and they hear about you a year or two before your first album comes out, you're the beneficiary in the sense that you suddenly have fans. You have people that you can play for. You have interest from record labels perhaps a little bit sooner than you would have in another era.

"And then, you know, victim is an extreme word, but you're the victim in the sense that you have to prepare yourself to be a real band extremely quickly. It's cool to get attention early on, but you also have a lot of scrutiny which some people are unprepared for. And luckily for us, we'd been more or less working on what would become our debut album for a while.

So, you know, it's not like suddenly all these people knew who we were and then we had to stop and think, Okay, what's our band all about, what are we gonna do for our first album? We'd kind of been preparing the whole time, so it worked out okay."

Mason: "And how would you describe who you were?"

Koenig: "Just a bunch of kind of preppy smartasses. (laughs) I think that's what we were at the time. That was the vibe of the band with, you know, some fairly big ideas, but also a sense of fun to balance it out. Because for all the things we were just talking about, our kind of big, intellectual ideas that we had about the fabric and aesthetics of the band, we also just started playing at parties and, you know, for drunk people, getting people to dance and sing along. So that was a part of the band, too."

Mason: "Well, if you look back on it, that's where a lot of bands really learn how to be a band, you know, playing parties in front of drunk people."

Koenig: "Yeah, 'cause not everything works. I mean, people say that children have the most honest taste because they're not trying to be cool and they just respond to what they respond to. And that's very true of drunk people as well."

Mason: "I've never thought of that comparison! (laughs) Well, that's basically what The Beatles did for, like, a year."

Koenig: "I still find releasing an album and putting all this work into something and then, you know, exposing it to the world, to be a stressful period, but I can only imagine if the first time you put a song online, you know, hundreds of thousands of people heard it, and then suddenly you'd become so self-conscious about everything else you were going to do."

Mason: "Well, how do you deal with that? I guess if you've had some success and some people like it, then you can just keep going."

Koenig: "Well, I think we were kind of the generation that was lived through that change. You know, when we were little kids, we more or less experienced the pre-Internet existence, not hugely dissimilar from anybody who grew up in post-war America.

"But then by the time we were teenagers, definitely the idea of having a presence online was part of most kids' identity. This is still before Facebook, but even when you're 12 or 13 and you're participating in chat rooms and doing all sorts of weird stuff with your friends and, like ****ing around with people, the idea of presenting yourself online enters into your consciousness.

"And so we kind of experienced both of those things, so maybe we think about it a different way. But I guess these days, if you're a kid and you've been posting videos to YouTube, Sound Cloud, Twitter, whatever, as long as you can remember, you're kind of used to the idea that everything is shared. And that if you're early -- you know, Justin Bieber, his little videos of him just being a kid messing around, playing the drums, trying to sing a song or something, that was part of his presentation from the beginning. Whereas, for us, our generation maybe thinks of those things as something that's supposed to be private. That's something that comes BEFORE you present yourself to the world. For him, who's I guess ten years younger than us, it's not."

Mason: "Well, yeah, he's lived his whole life out there, in a way."

Koenig: "Yeah, and it worked. So, maybe people just deal with it."

Mason: "This is another aspect of the whole Internet thing -- a lot of bands get built up very quickly and then it seems there's a backlash and they try to knock you down."

Koenig: "Right."

Mason: "Did you feel that?"

Koenig: "Sure. I remember the first time anybody blogged about us, it was on some sort of short-lived Ivy League blog. I don't even remember what it was called, but it was a blog that just talked about Ivy League news, which sounds so corny to say.

"But they wrote something about, Oh, this is a band of guys who went to Columbia and these are their songs. We saw on the comments some people being like, Oh, this is pretty good. And then other people -- I mean, you can imagine the type of person who would read a blog that's devoted to Ivy League matters. (laughs) So we're already talking about a certain type of person. People just being like, Oh, this sucks, like, the guy can't sing, the lyrics are stupid. The recordings don't sound good. Yeah, I remember we were a little bit bummed out about it but, you know, right off the bat you experience the range of opinions out there."

Mason: "And you just gotta live with it."

Koenig: "Yeah. And certainly around the time of the first album, it occasionally felt difficult, but that's just because it was happening for the first time. Now I look back on it and it mostly seems funny. (laughs)"

Mason: "Mostly."

Koenig: "But you know, it's a small price to pay for getting your music out there. And it's truly something that everybody has to deal with."

Mason: "Yeah, I think that's true. But I mean it did seem, to some degree, there was at least a small backlash to the whole sort of preppy thing in the beginning."

Koenig: "Yes, that's true. I mean people made big assumptions about us. And, you know, it had to do with the way we dressed and kind of the imagery we used. And when it happened, my first impulse, just being a normal human being who doesn't want to be hated, was kind of like, Oh, hold on, guys, maybe you don't understand. But now when I look back on it, it just makes me feel like the things we were interested in were worth talking about, the kind of images we liked to use, the sounds, the ideas. The fact that people had strong opinions about them means that perhaps we were onto something. And if people totally understood where we were coming from, that's great. And if they didn't, that's okay, too."

Mason: "That's part of the conversation."

Koenig: "Yeah. And now that it's been such a long time, now I really just don't care at all about anything. But you know, now you just realize some people will fully understand and some people won't. And it's not up to you to force them to kind of share your point of view anyway."

Mason: "I was struck by a lyric in this album, which was, "Wisdom's a gift, but you'd trade it for youth. Age is an honor, but it's still not the truth," which is a great lyric."

Koenig: "Oh, thanks."

Mason: "But I'm reading this and I'm thinking, I don't know how you're old enough to know that."

Koenig: "Well, yes, nobody in Vampire Weekend is that old yet, (laughs) but there certainly has been something of a transformative period over the past few years."

Mason: "In what sense?"

Koenig: "Well, just the kind of rate at which things changed. You know, being in college, briefly working, and then suddenly, you know, touring the world, you cross some sort of line and then you come back and you start to reflect on everything.

"And suddenly you do feel a lot older. It's sometimes it's hard to believe. There's something about touring, too, the way time passes. It's hard to believe that you've been to all these places, and then it's like, Oh, yeah, now we're back in Brussels again.

It does make you think a little bit about the way time passes. And so when you come back, yeah, it naturally makes you a little more reflective. And you think about growing up, where you were when you started, where you've been. I guess everybody thinks in those terms to some extent, but there's something about being in a band that maybe exacerbates it."

Mason: "It's interesting 'cause you said leaving college, working briefly, and then going out on tour, which implies that this isn't working."

Koenig: "I've always had a hard time thinking of being in a band as a real job. It's certainly work, but when I compare it to being a teacher, one feels like real work and one feels like a difficult, stressful, passionate hobby.

"And that's just me, maybe just in my own mind I have to think about it as being different. Arguably, being in a band is a really intense job. I mean, you have to work weekends. You're working every minute, but yeah, to think of it as work, as a true job, I can't.

"Sometimes I think, I was in college, then I had a job, then I was in a band. Maybe one day I'll have a real job again, but I don't think I could ever think of this as a job, which is not to say that it's easy, but it's -- it's just something else."

Mason: "Uh-huh. It is kind of in its own category. And if it became work, you probably wouldn't wanna do it."

Koenig: "Well, maybe that's the thing that I'm scared of, 'cause I've seen plenty of bands who start to think of it as a job and then, every few years you put out an album. That's what you're supposed to do because that's your job. And if you didn't do it, you wouldn't be doing your job.

"But we've always kind of waited until, like, the good ideas came to us. And we had to feel very strongly about an idea. Well, it kind of feels like putting the cart before the horse to start thinking about, Oh, this is my job. The reason that we release albums is because we're musicians -- whereas I feel like the reason that we're musicians is because we have something to say via our albums.

"And if the day comes where we don't really have any ideas, I can't imagine that we'd ever be able to just kind of throw something together. We would just get too depressed. We get depressed when we hear a mix of a song that sounds a little bit off, so to imagine that we'd release an entire album that we weren't excited about seems impossible.

"But luckily, now that we've done three, hopefully we've bought ourselves a little bit of time. Like with this record ["Modern Vampires of the City"], it took a little bit longer than we expected. We worked on it for about, well, the time in between the records ended up being about 3 1/2 years.

"If you had asked me, back in the 'Contra' days, 'How quickly do you want to get your next album out,' I would have said something much shorter than 3 1/2 years. But now that we're here, it feels about right, and it's good that we took our time with it."

Mason: "How does it feel different for you?"

Koenig: "This album?"

Mason: "Yeah."

Koenig: "It's funny to compare the three albums because even though I was a part of the creative process for all three, in some ways when I look back to the first album, that time seems so distant to me. It's hard for me to fully remember how things felt.

"To me, it feels very natural. I kind of feel like we're doing the same thing that we've always done. Some things change, but it's like we were talking about before, in the early days, when I pictured my memories of whatever, working on songs and writing with Rostam, I picture us being 18, in his dorm room, sitting in front of his computer, making some sort of demo of the song, 'Bryn.'

"Then I picture the apartment he and C.T. had in Greenpoint right when they graduated and me taking the bus up from Bed-Stuy, and us working on 'Oxford Comma' or 'A Punk,' and hearing some of the flute parts for the first time.

"And then, you know, I picture this album. It's kind of like sitting in his apartment where he lives now and playing me some stuff on piano, us talking about it. So, some things change, of course, but it does kind of all boil down to the same basic idea of this collaborative project of writing and recording songs.

"So, of course, every album hopefully is reflective of the time period in which it was made. I'd like to think that I've changed a little bit and hopefully learned something since I graduated from college, and probably everybody changes a little bit, but then there's some part of me that just doesn't believe that, does kind of feel like (laughs) nobody changes, everybody's the same.

"And I guess it's for other people to look at the three albums and kind of see the way that they . . . I can step back and try to come up with some decent explanations of the way that each album changed and expanded our universe, but you have to be so immersed in the album that you're making.

"So yeah, I don't know, it's a hard question to answer. I'd like to think that when all is said and done and people look back on the records that we've made, everyone will feel equally Vampire Weekend -- I don't know what the adjective is, 'Vampire Weekend-y'? (laughs) But each one will be kind of evocative of a different time period. I think that's the best that you can hope for as a band."

Mason: "I was talking to Pete Townsend, who was clearly excited by the fact that, when he was young, he was sort of the voice of his generation in England, and he knew it. And then when he finally sort of passed out of that point, he was pretty honest about how it kind of shook him and he didn't quite know what to do. And I can see how that, if you feel like you've got this connection and all of a sudden it stops, where do you go and who are you writing for, if you're not writing for [them] anymore or they don't need you anymore?"

Koenig: "Yeah, people like music that's . . . 'honest' is such a strange word to use to describe art, but that feels like the person who's making it is really just expressing what they want to express. They're not trying to be something else or something. And that's why, to me, like, 'Graceland' is probably the greatest grown-up album of all time, just because it was actually a guy who was -- I mean, how old was [Paul Simon]? Was he in his 40s by then?"

Mason: "He may have been."

Koenig: "I mean, certainly older than the average pop musician, but he made music that expressed his taste at the time -- lyrically was about being a divorced man with children. Things that he probably would not have been singing about in Simon and Garfunkel days.

"And because he kind of just did what he wanted to do, it ended up being a huge album. But yeah, that's something that I think about sometimes, too, just trying to hold on too hard to you. Especially 'cause, like, rock music is so associated with youth, I think sometimes people have this feeling, like -- "

Mason: "It's like, if you have three or four really successful albums, there's sort of these expectations that people seem to have that you need to keep doing that. And I'm like, why? You've built a catalog, people love it, do what you want to do."

Koenig: "Yeah. I think people fall into the trap of betraying the principles that made them successful in the first place. And if you became successful by following your own quirky instincts and then you start to somehow become more conservative or try to repeat yourself or try to give people what you think they want, it's not like -- there's no reward for it, anyway. Not only do you usually end up failing, but people probably, like, abandon you anyway."

WEB EXCLUSIVE VIDEO: Ezra Koenig on calling music work.

WEB EXCLUSIVE: Delve more deeply into Vampire Weekend by reading an extended interview by Anthony Mason of Rostam Batmanglij.

For more info:

• vampireweekend.com
• "Modern Vampires of the City" (XL Recordings); Also available on iTunes and Amazon