LIVE REVIEW: It's time to accept Vampire Weekend is my favorite band

With 16 years of memories in tow, it finally felt right to call myself a fan after a show at Meadow Brook Amphitheater.

Three songs into Vampire Weekend’s show this past week at Meadow Brook Amphitheater, I knew the nostalgia trip I was hoping to avoid was inevitable.

The band dusted off Oxford Comma, Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa and Boston (Ladies of Cambridge) from the era of its debut album to start the evening off and my mind began thinking back to summer 2008.

The same band of then 20-somethings took indie rock’s summer fan convention by storm with those same songs at the Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago, where I, like many of the onlookers, fully bought in on the charming, polo-shirted Ezra Koenig and company. Even though they only had about a dozen songs in their catalogue, the band felt energetic and built to last - only scratching the surface of its immense potential.

While the band has expanded its sound from the effervescent pop punk and Paul Simon-esque afro pop of 2008’s Vampire Weekend that instantly put them in the conversation of Important Bands of its generation, the songs were the first of many reminders throughout the evening that a lot can change in 16 years.

Koenig and Cults’ singer Madeline Follin, the show’s opener, both recalled playing at the same venue 10 years ago, with Koenig reassuring fans the band now had five albums worth of songs to draw from this time around.

Ezra later brought up the last time they had played in Detroit at the Mo Pop Music Festival - another show my wife and I attended with friends back in 2019 when the band was upstaged as headliners by Lizzo. The then-viral pop star’s insane homecoming show earlier in the evening caused a significant exodus of fans who came to see her chart-topping singles, allowing us to sneak up to toward the front of the crowd to see the band.

Suddenly, all I could think about was the passage of time and how Vampire Weekend fit into my life: The CD I bought of their debut album for my girlfriend before burning a copy for myself. Constantly playing Modern Vampires of the City after work at my friend Kyle’s apartment until he got sick of it. The debates with my wife over which side of Father of the Bride is the best while listening to it on vinyl (side A, though you could make a case for D).

Then I began noticing it everywhere else. My wife and I sat next to a family that brought their daughter. She had to have been born around the time the band’s second album Contra was released. The girl and her mother danced and sang along to every word of most songs, both completely incapable of being bothered and in their own unique element.

While it was really cute and endearing, it also sort of blew my mind. In the time I have been listening to this band, children have been brought into this world and taught the importance of their songs by their parents. Vampire Weekend. The band that sings about stuff like religion and class and war and pain. When I was 10, my favorite music was the theme song from Duck Tales.

It became clear this band that had in some ways remained suspended in my mind as youthful, boat shoe-wearing Ivy League overachievers was now grown up. Its fans now had children singing along to their catchy, world-weary anthems. Another 10-year old attending their first-ever concert had the song This Life dedicated to them later in the show - a hilarious song to dedicate to a child, I might add.

I guess I shouldn’t be particularly surprised by the nostalgia overload. The band’s fifth album it is touring in support of, Only God Was Above Us, is a self-referential revisitation of sounds, lyrics and song styles that examines the band’s history and place in it.

What did all of these revisitations and reminders of time’s evil dance mean, though?

I’ve thought about that question a lot since the show, and the best I can come up with is this: It looks like I stuck with this whole being a Vampire Weekend fan thing.

I usually try to hold off on declaring unabashed fanhood. Throughout my life, I’ve encountered plenty of super fans whose passion goes above the normal levels of following ban. My sister’s pre-teen love of New Kids on the Block. The group of guys who worshipped Black Sabbath in my seventh grade science class. My Dead Head and DMB family members and friends. The guy I worked with who had a tattoo of the Insane Clown Posse hatchetman.

Over time, I’ve realized my comfort zone comes in consuming everything in my path, rather than truly soaking in and obsessing over the work of a single favorite band or artist. While Vampire Weekend stuck to its new album material and played the hits throughout the evening, I still found myself singing along to most of the songs while having a solid knowledge of all of them, from the motor mouthed Contra cut Cousins to OGWAU instant classics Capricorn and Classical.

I also noticed myself picking up on smaller things, like anticipating the right song to go to the bathroom during (sorry, The Surfer!) or which direction the band was going to take its de facto jam, Sunflower from 2019’s Father of the Bride, (it briefly broke out into the Underground Theme from Super Mario Bros).

All of it seemed to point me toward the conclusion that I probably care about this band’s music more than I care to admit. I guess that makes them of my favorites still making music, if not the favorite, given the band’s 16-year track record that I’ve been following from the start. They make consistently great sounding and challenging albums. They take big swings in both song subject matter and arrangements and aren’t afraid to dip their toes into new territory. Despite their sophistication and book smarts, they’re catchy enough to keep just about anybody interested. Technical enough to demonstrate they’ve got chops without being too showy.

So, why was this a conclusion I was reluctant to reach? They’ve always felt a little unrelatable to me despite how catchy and fun their music can be. The lyrics are brick-dense, often requiring line-by-line Googling for references to pop culture, politics and history. As Scott Plagenhoef once beautifully put it, the band has A hell of a lot of complex, multifaceted songs about who or what's real, who or what we are, and what worrying about this stuff says about you.

That can be a lot. Typically, I’ve identified with bands or artists who are able to convey emotion, be self-deprecating and drop the occasional nugget of wisdom. Embracing Vampire Weekend as a favorite band, to me, felt like a betrayal of my tendency to identify with the underdog. These guys have their shit together. They write dauntingly beautiful songs and sound impossibly inventive on every album. They borrow from and showcase the most awesome, obscure references in their samples that are impeccably placed. They’re so good, you begin to resent it.

At least until you realize that the band’s complexity is often delivered in equal measure with empathy. Vampire Weekend closed out their set before the encore with Hope, the closing track from its most recent album. The cascading eight-minute meditation sounds unlike anything else in the band’s catalogue, and you can tell the guys already have reverence for its place in their catalogue. It points the band, which has felt like one of indie rock’s most reliable entities, in the direction of a much more uncertain future than it faced 16 years ago. The lyrics are intentionally vague enough to allow you draw direct conclusions about what they’re referencing, but familiar to the point that they feel like universal truths:

The prophet said we'd disappear/The prophet's gone, but we're still here

His prophecy was insincere/I hope you let it go

The righteous rage was foolish pride/The conquerors did not divide

The call keeps coming from inside/I hope you let it go

It’s a beautiful song that’s very human and it’s filled with lines like that, alternating between lines that fill you with hope and make you feel hopeless. As twinkling piano heightened the emotional resonance of the slow burner, I teared up a bit. Because of the message? Because the song and moment were beautiful? Because I felt on the same page with a band that can sometimes feel impossible to relate to intellectually? What would worrying about all of that say about me?

The emotional heft from Hope quickly evaporated when the band came out for the encore, doing their usually routine of taking requests of songs to cover from the audience, with typically mixed results. The Bob Seger covers of We’ve Got Tonight and Old Time Rock and Roll landed. Eminem’s Lose Yourself never got off the ground, as Ezra was embarrassed to get it started and mess up the lyrics. After an evening of taking in a bunch of dense, triumphant pop songs, though, it was nice to see the band joke around and improvise before closing out the show with fan favorite, Walcott - the same song the band closed out their set with 10 years ago.

It makes you think. What type of band has the ability to make you laugh, cry, reminisce and contemplate your place in the world after seeing them live? Apparently it’s Vampire Weekend, my favorite band.