‘My generation lied’: former Vampire Weekender Rostam on pop, protest and life as an Iranian-American | Music

TThe first song that Rostam Batmanglij ever learned to play on the guitar was Chuck Berry’s Johnny B Goode, the classic American rock’n’roll song about being an American rock’n’roll star. “It doesn’t get much more American than that,” he says, smiling.

42-year-old executive producer (Frank Ocean, Charli xcx, Carly Rae Jepsen) and ex Vampire Week A member is sitting across from me in a coworking cafe in London, trying to explain how he always had a US culture. He said: “My brother was born in France, my parents were born in Iran. But I was in my mother’s womb when I first came to America. My position is different. So what is the relationship with the American flag?”

Those questions come before American Stories, Batmanglij’s third and best album to date. His beautiful, linen-y pop music splits the gap between Astral Weeks and Andy Shauf, while Batmanglij sings about love, songwriting and, in the album’s clearest songs, the unflinching politics. As he was composing, he found himself drawn equally to Persian and Americana music, trying to reconcile the two. “Good problem,” he says. It sounds both American (pedal steel) and Middle Eastern (Amir Yaghmai, a member of Voidz, plays a lute like a Turkish saz lute).

The The 2025 election of New York Mayor Zohran MamdaniAn Indian Muslim democratic socialist, “it was at the same time that I found what I wanted to have on the album.” Although he now lives in Los Angeles, Batmanglij majored in music at Columbia University – where he joined Vampire Weekend – and lived in NYC for many years. He wrote emphatically in support of Mamdani’s campaign. Few American politicians have inspired as much hatred from the right as Mamdani, who was born in Uganda and has no doubts about his leftist politics. It got Batmanglij thinking about “the idea that there’s a policy of what is and isn’t American,” he says. “Zohran’s decision is to expand the content of the American leadership. That was important to me.”

The song was written and recorded before the US-Israeli war with Iran, and Rostam seems to be more focused on family history than Iran-American relations. But some American Stories songs seem to refer implicitly to Israel’s bombing of Gaza after the Hamas attack: “When they burned the olive trees / They set the leaves on fire / But their roots are too strong / To leave where they come from,” Batmanglij sings on Come Apart. On The Weight, he appears to be speaking directly to students who are criticizing the university’s relationship with Israel, confirming that he “has courage on your side”.

Batmanglij, who wears the iconic Artists4Ceasefire badge on his blazer, says American Stories’ music is “a reflection of the last few years”, but he is not drawn to its literal meaning. “I like the fact that you can talk to them and not know what’s going on, there are a lot of people who don’t know, but I don’t think an interview is a good place to find out, but I want people to say, ‘I love this song! And their best friend says, ‘Well, you know what they’re talking about, right?’

Batmanglij, who has worked extensively with gen Z artists including Clairo and Declan McKenna, believes that “young people have a better understanding of what’s going on in the world”. On the contrary, he adds: “I think that many people in my generation and older people have deceived themselves.”

It’s been ten years since Batmanglij left Vampire Weekend to pursue his full-time production and music career. He says he’s always been confident as a producer – a feeling reinforced by the fact that “Vampire Weekend’s first record, the first album I produced, is platinum” – but going solo has allowed him to follow every amazing idea to its conclusion. He said: “It may be a bad idea, but I will believe in it and I want to continue to believe in it. “There is something exciting about refusing to give up on an idea.”

One such idea was Hardy, a song that featured Clairo, whose debut album Immunity he produced. He made the song in 2012, but didn’t know how to make it until recently. “I spent about two or three years just writing words,” he says, “before I started recording any words.” The result of this song is an attempt to write a song – a meta concept that is, he says, a “tricky place” for any musician, but somehow it works.

This is what goes on in American stories: most of the sounds and ideas don’t have to work together, but absolutely, thanks to Batmanglij’s touch. I ask how his parents feel when they make an album inspired by their experiences immigrating to America. “My mom was like, ‘Why don’t you sing in Persian?'” he says, laughing. He will not be happy!