Til They Can’t Hear Anything

Vampire Weekend “Harmony Hall”

The first time Ezra Koenig sang “I don’t want to live like this, but I don’t want to die,” it was at the climax of “Finger Back,” on the second side of Modern Vampires of the City. That record was in many ways about the pressure to achieve goals and have experiences on a tight schedule, motivated by a deep fear of aging and the narrowing of one’s options. Every character on the album was terrified that their time was running out, or that they were in some trap they needed to escape.

That line has popped up again in “Harmony Hall,” the first Vampire Weekend single in quite some time. The music is more mellow and graceful, but Koenig’s perspective has shifted. He’s singing about frustration with a complicated world, and the seeming impossibility of separating wealth from power. It’s a song about feeling disillusioned and disappointed, and that phrase – “I don’t want to live like this, but I don’t want to die” – feels even more ambivalent than when he sang it the first time. Is he shrugging it all off? Is he going to try to fight it? In the context of the song, he sounds hopeful as he sings it. I hear it as someone trying to find joy in a world he knows is rigged and unfair.

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