Band with bite build up a loyal fang club

Vampire Weekend. Photo / Supplied

Don't read too deeply into Vampire Weekend frontman Ezra Koenig's lyrics. They are not necessarily an extended metaphor for love, life or grief.

"Sometimes our songs are about very simple things. People ask me what the song Mansard Roof is about because they imagine that it needs to be some crazy metaphor about life and death, and I say, 'It is about looking at the mansard roof through the trees'. Not every song needs to be about heartbreak or death or depression - some songs need to be - but hopefully you are not getting your heart broken every single day."

He adds that people who are unfortunate enough to have had their heart broken might need something a little more peppy on their headphones than a mournful ballad.

"We get emails from people who say, 'Your music helped me through difficult times'. I always feel very vindicated. Because occasionally people have accused us of writing songs about nothing."

Since the internet made them famous three years ago, Vampire Weekend have dodged taunts about everything from their lyrics to their upbringing. Critics called the band a bunch of over-hyped, wealthy New York preppy-boys.

But the release of their second album Contra this month proved they were not just a passing craze. The album shot to No 1 on the American charts and is sitting among the Top 20 in New Zealand.

Vampire Weekend's four members came together at university, and began recording in dorm rooms before eventually releasing tracks on the internet in 2007.

Music blogs caught wind of their quirky tribal-cum-orchestral sound and suddenly Vampire Weekend was the name on every indie kid's lips. A year later the band's eponymous debut album was officially released, and sold half a million in the US.

Vampire Weekend might have lost a lot of cash through all the file-sharing before the release, but Koenig prefers to think of it as the fans doing the band's marketing for them.

"Some people would assume that if your album was available on the internet for a year, everyone would have gotten it, no one would buy it. But that's not the case - in the first week that the album was released there were people buying it. Whether they had downloaded already or heard it from a friend I don't know, but when you look at those two things together it makes you realise the internet's a very important tool.

"I could look at it and say, 'We sold almost a million records around the world and if we came out in 1995 maybe we would have sold four million - would we have made that much more money?'

"But then I can also say, 'You know what, in 1995 maybe nobody would have given us a record deal, maybe people would have forced us to change our music, maybe we would have that much less freedom and maybe, without the internet, our music wouldn't have been able to spread in the same way'. So sometimes I think our band is very lucky that we are operating in this time period."

But Vampire Weekend does not rely on going viral in cyberspace - tours include intimate shows in places off the beaten track.

"When you are doing the big national tour you paint in broad strokes, and you have to play in the big cities because hopefully it's relatively convenient for a lot of people, but this was more about trying to play for kids in smaller cities, suburbs, you know. Situations where they could just walk over."

Last year, in the lead-up to the release of Contra, Vampire Weekend put on a free show in a skatepark deep in the suburbs, another free show in Boyle Heights, a neighbourhood in Los Angeles largely made up of immigrants that wouldn't usually attract an indie-rock band, and a cowboy bar in a town in the desert that was built to film westerns in the 1940s.

Sometimes it seemed the whole town turned up to the show - mothers, daughters, fathers and sons. It was then that the band realised they didn't just appeal to males aged 25 to 35, Koenig says.

"We have so many fans who are like, 13 and 14-year-old girls and boys ... after the show those kids would always be waiting behind the venue and asking for us signatures and occasionally giving us horchata and stuff like that.

"They haven't become too self-conscious about being enthusiastic, which is a nice thing."

The recent tours and the people the band have met made their way into Vampire Weekend's lyrics on Contra.

Koenig explains as a child he learned a great deal about the world from his parents' music collection - while his father never travelled extensively, he listened to records from Jamaica, the deep south and Africa.

"Even as a kid I always had this feeling that music was a way of exploring the world without going anywhere. I think it's important to go and see the places that you're listening to. But I think we are also lucky that you don't have to be some kind of cultural anthropologist going out to do field research to hear music.

"If you want to really understand what it's like to live in another country you have to go and spend time there, but to simply hear music? We are living in the greatest moment for that that's ever happened. You can find blogs dedicated to making MP3s of cassette tapes from Morocco in the 70s, and I feel privileged to be part of it."

Lowdown

Who: Ezra Koenig, lead vocalist and lyricist in Vampire Weekend.
What: Indie rock band from New York.
Albums: Vampire Weekend (2008), Contra (2010)
Latest: Contra climbed to No 1 in the United States.