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Sep 12, 2018 Rostam By Christopher Roberts

Rostam Batmanglij (formerly of Vampire Weekend and who just goes by his first name these days) released his debut solo album, Half-Light, last year via Nonesuch. Now he has shared a brand new song, “In a River,” via an animated lyric video. The song is about skinny dipping in a river at night. Check it out below. If you’re in Los Angeles, Rostam will be headlining at the city’s Fonda Theatre this Friday, September 14.

Rostam had this to say about the song in a press release: “‘In a River’ is the first song I wrote on the mandolin. In January we started rehearsing the song for the Half-Light North American Tour and it became a staple of every show. When we came back from that month-long tour I booked time at Vox Studios in Hollywood and jumped into recording the song. At that point we had played it some twenty times in front of twenty different audiences across the country. About halfway through the tour I started bringing the audience into the song and asking them to clap along after that second chorus. I have memories of how those claps sounded, I can still remember how hard they hit in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in a packed theatre with a foot of snow on the ground outside.

“When we got in the studio, I knew I wanted to capture the feeling we got when we played it live, so I pulled the audio off a YouTube clip from a few nights prior - in San Francisco - and dropped it in the Pro Tools session. That audio became a road map for how the song should move. The tempo fluctuates widely- kicking up as the drums enter and the violins solo, then settling into a slower groove when we get back to the chorus, finally slowing down even more as the song ends with the 808 bass and vocals. It’s so rare that modern music gets ‘off the grid’ but ‘In a River’ is a hybrid. It’s steady for the first half but then free in tempo from the moment the drums come in.

“I often want the songs I produce to be meeting places for organic and electronic sounds - old traditions and new ones. ‘In a River’ is new territory for me because although it’s a studio recording, it’s pulling from one of the oldest traditions in music, a live performance in front of an audience.”

Half-Light includes “Gwan,” a single that Rostam released a video for back in April 2017, “Bike Dream,” and title track “Half-Light.” Rostam produced all three of Vampire Weekend’s albums, but left the band in 2016 to focus on his solo work and producing. In 2016 Rostam teamed up with Hamilton Leithauser of The Walkmen and released a collaborative album, I Had a Dream That You Were Mine, via Glassnote.

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