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Jun 14, 2017 By Christopher Roberts Rostam

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Rostam Batmanglij (formerly of Vampire Weekend and who just goes by his first name these days) has announced his debut solo album, Half-Light, and shared a lyric video for its new single, “Bike Dream.” The album is due out September 8 via Nonesuch. Half-Life also includes “Gwan,” a single that Rostam released a video for back in April. Below is “Bike Dream,” followed by the album’s tracklist and cover art, as well as the video for “Gwan” again.

Rostam produced all three of Vampire Weekend’s albums, but left the band early last year to focus on his solo work and producing. Last year Rostam teamed up with Hamilton Leithauser of The Walkmen and released a collaborative album, I Had a Dream That You Were Mine, via Glassnote.

Rostam had this to say about the album and its title in a press release: “It wasn’t until I had almost finished this album and was trying to decide what I should call it that I took the time to look up the word ‘half-light.’ That lyric, and a large part of that song ‘Half-Light,’ had come to me in a stream of consciousness sitting in front of a piano years ago, captured in a voice memo on my phone. I had never stopped to figure out what that word meant exactly. But when I read its definition, and found that it had a double meaning—that it referred to both dawn and dusk—I started to think of how those times of day are part of so many lyrics on this album.

“I was also struck by the fact that it was a word with a double meaning. That felt important to this record. It made me think back to a friend in Japan who told me that the word ‘double’ was becoming more and more popular than ‘half’ for people to describe their split ethnicities. Any person growing up in America with immigrant parents experiences this dichotomy, of feeling both double and half. It’s something a lot of us who identify as queer experienced growing up as well, slipping between straight and gay worlds, code-switching. I say experienced in the past tense because I don’t know that that’s the experience today’s kids will have. Things are changing.

“I think what draws me to dawn and dusk as a songwriter is that those are the moments where we feel change deepest in a day. Those are the moments where I seem to experience the onset of a realization and the strongest feelings of optimism about the future. With this record, I’m trying to share some of those realizations and some of that optimism.”

Half-Light Tracklist:

01. Sumer
02. Bike Dream
03. Half-Light ft Kelly Zutrau
04. Thatch Snow
05. Wood
06. Never Going To Catch Me
07. Don’t Let It Get To You
08. I Will See You Again
09. Hold You ft. Angel Deradoorian
10. When
11. Rudy
12. Warning Intruders
13. EOS
14. Gwan
15. Don’t Let It Get To You (Reprise)

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