The Dark Side Of Your Room

Vampire Weekend “Mary Boone”

If you go on how people talk about music now, you’d get the impression that most listeners aren’t even interested in songs that they can’t relate to, often in very literal 1:1 ways. While it’s always nice to feel like the lyrics of a song are either speaking to you or speaking for you, this has rarely been central to how I engage with music. I tend to prefer lyrics that give me insight into other people’s lives one way or another, and to be honest, I don’t find all that many songs that I can hear and go “yes, that’s me.” But maybe that’s only because I’m rarely looking for myself in other people’s art to begin with.

Case in point, I was listening to “Mary Boone” almost every day for nearly two months before it occurred to me that this song had a powerful emotional resonance with me in part because I have so much in common with the protagonist of the lyrics. It’s probably the only piece of art I’ve encountered that feels like it truly reflects anything about my life as it is right now in 2024.

The guy in “Mary Boone” is an artist in the 1980s or maybe early 90s who feels like he’s on the outside of everything but is desperately yearning to become part of something and contribute to the art world. He feels like he needs external validation – like, say, catching the eye of the hottest art dealer in Manhattan – before he can move forward with anything in his life. So he feels stuck and isolated, and even if he loves making his art he knows it needs to be completed by an audience somehow or else he’s not communicating or participating in the culture.

He’s observing the art world and he feels a parasocial connection to the artists in the scene and especially with Boone herself. He often sounds like he’s in love with her – “well I hope you feel like loving someone soon” – and maybe that’s an intentional ambiguity, like he’ll take any version of getting on the inside that’s available to him. Maybe it’s just as valid and realistic a fantasy as getting on the walls of her gallery. It’s possibly a Stockholm Syndrome sort of thing, feeling some affection for a gatekeeper. Or perhaps it’s just a symptom the parasocial thing, feeling a false closeness to someone who doesn’t even know he exists.

A lot of the reason I didn’t pay much attention to the lyrics of “Mary Boone” is that Ezra Koenig and Ariel Rechtshaid’s arrangement dazzled me from the start. Specifically, it’s the parts of the song that drop in a sample of the drum programming from Soul II Soul’s 1989 classic “Back to Life (However Do You Want Me).” I can’t remember the last time I was so genuinely surprised and delighted by a musical choice, and that delight has hardly faded after hearing it many times over. The arrival of the beat shifts the atmosphere of the song, broadens its implied scale, and adds a lot of emotional depth to the piece.

In the context of the lyrics, the “Back to Life” break makes me think of how this guy feels as he enters Manhattan, heading in from New Jersey or Queens. The drum part is gritty but also signals a specifically urban notion of sophistication – if we think of this song taking place around 1989 or 1990, this would be the cutting edge of popular music.

The first time we hear the break, it’s paired with a melancholic string part that makes me imagine him walking through Soho or Chelsea feeling hopeless and pessimistic. I wish I could explain it, maybe it’s the juxtaposition of loving a place but feeling humbled by it, but this part has had me on the verge of tears a few times over. When the break returns later, it’s contrasted with a bright piano part that feels like a burst of optimism – maybe it really can happen! The third time, most of the elements of the song return and converge for an emotionally ambiguous climax.

There’s also a choir on this song! I like how it lends the song a holy feeling, and makes this guy’s quest to find an audience for his art feel like a spiritual pursuit. At the end of the bridge he tells Boone that she’s the “author of everything, use this voice and let it sing” before the choir takes over from Koenig on the final chorus. He’s not asking to be a star; he just wants to belong, and be heard.

Some notes:

• I think “oh my love, was it all in vain / we always wanted money, now the money’s not the same” would sting in any era, but I think this is a very recognizable sentiment for most anyone working in any creative field in 2024. Koenig delivers the line so that you can register the character’s disappointment in practical terms, but also get that money truly isn’t really what he’s after.

• “In a quiet moment at the theater, I could hear the train” is a real IYKYK line for New Yorkers. Koenig is almost certainly referring to seeing a movie at the Angelika on West Houston. It opened in September 1989, which lines up perfectly with the timeline suggested by the Soul II Soul sample.

• “I’m on the dark side of your room” is such a great image. I love how the turn of phrase playfully deflates the romantic grandeur implied by Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and the actual moon itself, and makes me picture this guy attending a Mary Boone Gallery opening and being off in some far corner, so close yet so far away.

• I like the somewhat chaotic use of vocal ad libs in the “Back to Life” breaks, but most especially the part near the end where you hear a snippet of the first word of the song – “painted” – but it cuts off. It sounds like it might have been a happy accident, like a file dragged and dropped to the wrong part of the grid. It has a great effect in context – a fake-out for another verse, hearing the protagonist one more time in a way that suggests he’s back at square one, an artful bit of messiness that gives some extra spark of life to a very considered composition.

Buy it from Amazon.