Photo by Chiaki Nozu/Redferns
When Vampire Weekend dropped Father of the Bride in May, the Ivy-League grads seemed to trade in the elite associations of their discography’s past for a more folksy feel. In a new episode of Song Exploder, frontman Ezra Koenig explored how the Southern rock influences on “Harmony Hall” mirrored the layered themes of power and utopia in the lyrics.
To achieve more of a jam-band sound, Vampire Weekend brought in a bunch of outside musicians. There’s Tommy King, who adds more of a saloon-style piano into the mix. Then Greg Leisz makes “Harmony Hall” feel more like Southern rock thanks to his pedal steel guitar. “Vampire Weekend never had any twang,” Koenig said. “You can go overboard. But it’s like, for us to sound like Vampire Weekend but have a touch of that. And that’s why I think it’s important to have other players, because they’re just playing in the vernacular that they know.”
While fans mistakenly drew connections to the Harmony Hall of Koenig’s alma mater, Columbia University, the frontman took an academic approach to his own close read of the song. During his research on the name, he found that there’s a lot of buildings from “19th century utopian movements” where someone would start a town and call a building Harmony Hall:
One time, I was in Antigua… there was a place there called Harmony Hall. It might’ve been a resort or something. But it originally was a slave plantation that was called Harmony Hall, so they kept the name. Obviously, this continues to be an ongoing issue—people get married at plantations. These really bizarre situations where people want to erase the history of a place and be like, ‘Oh, it’s a gorgeous old house.’ As I was looking more at places called Harmony Hall, there were plantations in the South in the U.S. that were called Harmony Hall. But I think there was something about that dissonance—I guess pun intended—of a place called Harmony Hall that could be a utopian movement and also a plantation, which is the opposite of utopian, literally dehumanizing people. And then on top of that, this added thing of being kind of turned into a fun thing that doesn’t have the bloody, dehumanizing, racist history of a plantation. And the idea that calling something “harmonious” doesn’t make it harmonious. That was something interesting to me.
He elaborated on the meaning he found in such a sordid-yet-manicured history. “Every time I would come across this name Harmony Hall, there was always something dissonant about the history or the place,” he said. “For me, when I was working on the song, it became helpful to think of it as literally a building. Something that represents harmony: the highest ideal of human society, but sometimes inhabited by the worst people in the world.
The songwriter reflected on how the White House is a kind of Harmony Hall:
It’s helpful to have these conversations just like, “What are places that are like a Harmony Hall?” And one of the first things that came up was the White House. The White House is literally a symbol of American democracy. And this is where it gets funny— I don’t want to say, “Yeah, Harmony Hall is the White House.” Because that’s not how I think about songwriting. But as we started to figure out the logic of the song, it was helpful to think of the White House as an example. And this is pre-Trump, so it’s like [laughs]… It took on added resonance as we were working on it. But this idea that the White House represents supposedly the things that are great about American democracy, and yet all sorts of knuckleheads have been living in there, doing terrible things long before our current president.
Bouncing off of this historical context, he structured each verse from a different POV on the power continuum. “So we’re talking about a place that represents political power,” he said. “That helped me to really think about the verses. If you’re talking about power, one verse could maybe talk about people without power. One verse is the people with power. The way that I think about it pretty simply is that verse one are the people outside the palace walls, the revolutionaries”:
We took a vow in summertime
Now we find ourselves in late December
I believe that New Year’s Eve
Will be the perfect time for their great surrender
But they don’t remember
“Then in the next verse,” he continued, “I thought about the person in the palace who is worried and who doesn’t understand the logic of the people outside the palace walls”:
Within the halls of power lies a nervous heart that beats
Like a Young Pretender’s
Beneath these velvet gloves I hide
The shameful, crooked hands of a moneylender
‘Cause I still remember
Co-producer Ariel Rechtshaid noted that the “arrangement kind of follows the narrative” of the lyrics.
Naturally, a song called “Harmony Hall” features plenty of harmonizing, as Ezra’s vocals blend with HAIM’s Danielle Haim and Dave Longstreth on the last half of this line:
Singers harmonize ‘til they can’t hear anything
“There’s something funny about a large group of people proudly and triumphantly singing about how they ‘can’t hear anything,’” Koenig said.
The track also features a callback to the band’s 2013 album cut, “Finger Back”:
I don’t wanna live like this, but I don’t wanna die
That line is reflective of how Koenig didn’t want to tie up the storyline with a neat bow. “The conclusion is not obvious. It’s just like, I don’t like the way I’m living. I don’t feel good. And yet I’m not ready to give it all up as a martyr,” he said. “It wouldn’t be reflective of how I feel or how I see reality to look at all these examples of power struggles and vicious cycles and then end on a chipper note and say, ‘And that’s why you can never give up, man.’ That’s not what this song is saying. So this song had to end in that feeling of being trapped between two things, not knowing where that third path is.”
In January, the band teased their latest album by releasing “Harmony Hall” and “2021,” the first of their three double-single drops.
Listen to the full Song Exploder episode here, and read all the lyrics to “Harmony Hall” on Genius now.
