Anyone who has read my other album reviews should know already that I am drawn to those that are unified around a single theme. Whether that is a vague concept or a collection of related images or an emotional impulse, I am consistently impressed by a band’s ability to keep my thoughts whirling around the central idea of its album.
More often than not, the albums that catch my attention do so in obvious ways that strike me within the first couple of listens; however, there are some albums to which I return again and again for some time without realizing what is pulling me back. This was the case with Vampire Weekend’s newest effort, Father of the Bride. Released May 3 of 2019, the album has been out for over a year, and I have been returning to it frequently over that time. Finally, I think I know the theme that keeps me so interested in the lyrics that overlay the fun and engaging musical variety.
Vampire Weekend’s frontman, Ezra Koenig, has produced Father of the Bride, I believe, as a kind of ode to his uniquely millennial experience of entering true adulthood in the 2010s.
Now, to remind my boomer readers, millennials are an actual generational cohort born between 1981 and 1996 (give or take a year), not just any young person who does things you don’t like. As of today’s writing, we are talking about people who are 24 to 39 years old. Did you hear that? All of us are years beyond traditional college age. And up to 40! The front of the millennial train is cresting the hill and is nearly over it.
So, any current depiction of a millennial life has to reckon with experiences that are of a little more weight than deciding where to go for spring break. That’s not to say that older generations will not still find millennial concerns tedious and immature; they probably will. However, it is worth the time it will take to reorient our expectations of what we will find occupying millennials’ minds. And I hope you feel it is worth reading the entirety of this review. The review would not have been worth the writing if I didn’t do a thorough, deep dive.
On Father of the Bride, Koenig levels his listener with the stereotype of the millennial who is unable or unwilling to commit to anything for any length of time while simultaneously craving desperately to contribute to or partake in something of lasting significance. But instead of a caricature of a fumbling and independent youth, we are instead introduced to an unsettlingly authentic depiction of the existential crises millennials confront when their hopes and fears mingle uncomfortably within their highest priorities. The foreboding and promise of romantic relationship is the canvas on which Koenig presents the millennial experience, at moments giving way to undertones of spiritual and eternal consequence, i.e. religion.
Father of the Bride opens with the first of three duets interspersed throughout the album and the words, “I know the reason why you think you gotta leave. Promises of future glory don’t make a case for me. I did my best, and all the rest is hidden by the clouds. I can’t carry you forever, but I can hold you now.” Our male speaker will not promise to support his lover long-term because he won’t lie and say that he will commit to her; all he can say is that he cares for her in the moment – the millennial stereotype starts out strong. The song goes on to reveal that he has just woken in the bed of his ex-lover on the morning of her marriage to another man. He is torn and emotional, but she seems detached and unworried. She asks, “Why’s your heart grown heavy, boy, when things were feeling light?” She’s been able to move on from the emotional weight their old relationship, but we cannot say she is in a healthy place. Her marital commitment comes steeped in faithlessness. Conversely, that which keeps him from pursuing commitment with her is his unwillingness to be unfaithful. He sees his own marriage as a sacred thing that he will not commit to lightly; it seems that she does not feel the same way.
The second track, ‘Harmony Hall,’ introduces us to the central conflict of the album. The primary voice we hear is very concerned with the purity of what he perceives as truly good and holy, but it is not difficult for him to see “the wicked snakes inside a place you thought was dignified.” He feels a deep responsibility to maintain all that is spiritually pure while recognizing that such purity necessarily excludes him, a sinful and duplicitous money-lender. Haunting lyrics intone, “I don’t wanna live like this, but I don’t wanna die.” He holds onto a belief in some sort of worldly spirituality, but lives in a reality that is grim and ugly and anything but enchanted. There is some real tension in these lyrics.
It is worth noting here that the chorus that separates the male and female parts on the first track’s duet is a Melanesian choral hymn that translates, “God, take my life and let it be, consecrated Lord to Thee. Take my hands and let them move at the impulse of Thy love.” Koenig, who was raised in the Jewish faith, is not shying away from religious associations. God and our relationship to him is an explicit, if understated, theme on this album, and it is a reasonable explanation for much of the tension that lingers uncomfortably under the more obvious readings of the lyrics. A real spiritual gravity overshadows the album.
On the third track, Koenig conflates his own religious history with Christian sentiments, a move we see more than once on the album. The speaker was hoping to stick it out with his female counterpart, but a sense of impending defeat paired with the cruel conflict that can accompany romantic relationships cause him to admit, “I thought I could probably stay, but… my Christian heart cannot withstand the thundering arena. I’ll see you when the violence ends. For now, ciao ciao, bambina.” Instead of identifying himself with the Christians who willingly suffered the persecution of the Roman Empire in gladiatorial arenas, the speaker instead sees himself as having a tender Christian conscience that has difficulty tolerating gratuitous violence. In this more modern and western religious position, a cultural Christianity of generations past that millennials have stereotypically abandoned, there is no vivacity or bravery or stick-to-itiveness. If religion is going to be a useful part of this man’s life, it will have to be of another brand than the lukewarm hypocrisies of previous generations.
The next track, ‘This Life,’ is the clearest and most obvious explanation of what our millennial speaker is dealing with. He admits throughout the song that he was told of the difficulties of living life seriously and remaining faithful to a romantic partner, but he also makes it clear that he did not actually believe the warnings given by those who came before him. He thought his relationship would be the exception to the rule, as he sings, “Baby, I know pain is as natural as the rain. I just thought it didn’t rain in California.” He says, of course relationships are hard, I just didn’t think mine would be this hard. Of course people are failures, I just didn’t think I would stoop so low.
Why would he believe his relationship would be some unrealistically easy, fairy tale kind of love? We look to ‘Married in a Gold Rush’ for the answer. In this song we hear that the government, an allegorical stand-in for our institutionalized cultural beliefs, is making everyone believe that they can strike out their own and find all the happiness they could ever want. Just like the California Gold Rush, way more people than will reasonably be satisfied by that promise of success and fortune buy into the hope. Only too late do we find that all those Disney™ stories and cinematic romances are fictional, top to bottom. Even those who find gold eventually squander their good luck and come back down to earth. When that happens, the only healthy response is for both partners to say, “I wanna put things back together. I wanna give don’t wanna take. Time to disavow the gold rush and the bitterness that’s flourished in its wake.”
Luckily, our speaker knows that life is more than just fleeting romantic satisfaction. If he didn’t, we would not have a worthwhile album. He can see that life cannot be limited to purely selfish motives. Returning to the end of ‘This Life,’ we hear him say, “Baby, I know death probably hasn’t happened yet, cause I don’t remember living life before this. And darling, our disease is the same one as the trees, unaware that they’ve been living in a forest.” The speaker rejects purely nihilistic selfishness; he even ignores the selfishness of contributing to our own reincarnated happiness.
Instead, he recognizes that every human, like trees in a forest, contributes to something much bigger than himself in space and time. We bear responsibility for those around us and those who will come after us. In ‘Sympathy,’ he reinforces this point when he states that even a single additional person within our sphere of connection can ground us in the world. He says, “I was never gonna get ahead cause I was looking in the mirror,” and later, “Judeo-Christianity, I’d never heard the words. Enemies for centuries, until there was a third.” When we cannot sense responsibility for anyone beyond ourselves, we cannot contribute to much of anything, but when we can make a connection with another person (or people), even a utilitarian one (as in the Judeo-Christian opposition to Islam), we develop sympathy and the power of human relationship. All of a sudden, we are responsible to the group, however small, as the group is also responsible to us. We see ourselves in others, and we recognize the spark of human dignity.
Our speaker takes this responsibility very seriously, which is how he maintains the millennialist tension between easy desire and solemn commitment. He wants something big and important. He knows accomplishing what he wants will take serious dedication. He is not sure he is willing to dedicate as much as will be needed. So, he falters on the commitment and reexamines whether his desires are worth pursuing seriously.
We can sense his impatience at the requisite time and commitment in ‘How Long?’ The song starts with the recognition of past hurts that the speaker has suffered in his relationship. In another nod to cultural Christianity (why Koenig keeps nodding that direction, I cannot venture a confident guess), the speaker reminds his beloved, “You broke my heart at midnight mass. Now I’m the ghost of Christmas past,” and later he asks, “Why’s it feel like Holloween since Christmas 2017?” Clearly, he feels that past pains have caused him to retreat behind a mask of protection, insincerity, and invulnerability. He is willing to commit a little time and dedication to the relationship, but probably not much. With tongue in cheek, he spells out how he sees their situation.
“Getting to the top
wasn’t s’posed to be this hard.
The house is on Mulholland Drive.
The car’s on Sunset Blvd.
The registration’s here with me.
Neither of us has the key.
We can live down in the flats.
The hills will fall eventually.”
Betraying Koenig’s new residence in Los Angeles, the speaker shows that he and his beloved are not where they want to be. The image used is that these two are in the flats of LA desiring to get to their house in the hills that overlook the city. But without the means to drive up those long roads that would take them home, he says they can just live in the valley. Surely in time erosion will bring the hills level with the valley, but the contrast of the millions of years that would take compared to the small effort that they would have to make to climb the hill is comical. The absurdity is accentuated with a musical twang at the end of that verse. This sarcasm throws into stark relief the speaker’s unwillingness to sign on for what is relatively a very short commitment.
In ‘2021,’ we see the sentiment echoed. The speaker wonders whether it is a responsible decision to wait three years for conditions amenable to a successful relationship to pan out. Will the relationship even be relevant anymore? Will they still love each other or succumb to the ravages of passing time?
The single verse of the song, repeated twice, has a final line that lacks a resolution in its rhyme scheme. The lines go, “2021, will you think about us? / Copper goes green, steel beams go rust / It’s a matter of…” The rhyme that includes ‘us’ and ‘rust’ is unresolved. Our ears are listening for that last rhyming word, but we don’t get it. It sounds wrong. What is it that’s missing? – ‘Trust.’ Our speaker is not sure that he can trust his beloved and himself to hold onto their commitment to each other for three years. So instead of committing and failing, he feels it would be better to wait it out and see what is going on in three years.
The album’s narrator obviously – OBVIOUSLY! – desires a real and abiding and healthy relationship with his lover. And just as obviously, he wavers on how he feels about putting all of his faith in her and his ability to commit to her.
As we enter into the second half of the album, words and images begin to pull together what might otherwise be disconnected songs. The repetitions between songs are not obvious until the lyrics are read closely and the overarching theme is analyzed intently. And through these repeating words and phrases, various and otherwise dubious sub-themes are buttressed under the overarching premise of the album.
The obvious pairing of songs, ‘Sunflower’ and ‘Flower Moon,’ both featuring Steve Lacy, give a gloomy view of the millennial perspective. ‘Sunflower,’ with its upbeat and cheery tune, shows a lazy man refusing to wake with the sun, even calling the daylight “evil.” In this refusal to get up and get out, he has a “strange thought upon the pillow, ‘What day demands a date.’” The thought is that the passage of time is natural, but why should we put formal labels on it? An obvious connection exists between days and dates, which we see stated in ‘We Belong Together,’ but it might be an artificial, manmade one. Why not live life easily breezily and disregard the responsibilities of the day?
‘Flower Moon,’ in concert with ‘Sunflower,’ claims that the night is as useless as the day. Daytime is the wrong time in ‘Sunflower,’ and nighttime is the wrong time in ‘Flower Moon.’ – “Flower moon, curse the night.” And so it happens that, “suddenly it’s much too late. The rising tide’s already at the gate.” The timing was just never right.
The image of the rising tide overwhelming the man and his lover is one that occurs a number of times on the album. First in ‘Bambina,’ we hear, “No time to discuss it. Can’t speak when the waves reach our house upon the dunes. Time cannot be trusted.” So too in ‘How Long?’ the speaker asks, “How long till we sink to the bottom of the sea? How long till we sink and it’s only you and me?” The rising tide is an image of steady and unstoppable impending doom. The tide of relational trials will come in. When it does, everything the lovers built will be submerged. Although the tide will rise slowly, the knowledge that it will eventually overwhelm them makes its reality feel more immediate. There is no time to wait; better to get out of Dodge now.
Another repeating image that we see is the natural light, heat, and life of summer compared to the deathly cold of winter, both of which are also contrasted against the positive and negative aspects of artificial or manmade heat, light, energy, and warmth. Early in the album, on ‘Harmony Hall,’ the song starts with, “We took a vow in summertime. Now we find ourselves in late December.” The year-as-life metaphor is a well-worn trope that should immediately point the listener of Father of the Bride to the fact that vows taken in the early and healthy times of a relationship look very different in the late and hard times. Vows were easy when life was all sunshine and roses, but as things grow frigid, can we hold on?
That’s not to say that two people cannot flourish in the hard times. In ‘Spring Snow,’ it is in fact an unexpected snow storm that keeps the two lovers in each other’s arms. Again, we hear about “those toxic gold rays” of the sun encroaching on the comfort of the millennial in bed like in ‘Sunflower,’ but here at least our speaker is not just lazy, but wanting to make the most of the last moments before his beloved must go. He finds an unusual but good warmth in the presence of his lover. This is echoed in ‘Stranger.’ He admits that the presence of his lover and her welcome sister warm up his icy disposition, something foreign and strange to this man who has always held himself at a distance from others. The lover’s “got the right light, candles burning, we don’t need the moon anymore.” In this callback to ‘Flower Moon,’ he recognizes the artificiality of the warmth and light that he is surrounded by; however, maybe relationships, though they take human exertion and energy, though they are strange to him, are actually really good.
Although humans can create their own summer warmth through relationship, the speaker still refuses to put too much hope in it. He struggles to see past the present. He will not hold hope for the future. He is content as long as he is with his lover – “You’re here in my arms, so what should I say?” But he knows the year goes on, time passes, and he will eventually lose what he loves – “The seasons we had don’t mean anything.” Everything outside of now is uncertain, useless.
In fact, if these lovers are not careful and they lean too heavily on those Disney™ expectations, the artificiality of human connection threatens to consume them. In ‘Jerusalem, New York, Berlin,’ he claims that this is a societal problem when he sings, “Now the battery’s too hot. It’s burning up in its tray. Young marriages are melting and dying where they lay.” It may have felt that they were careful and loving and good, but ‘Bambina’ warns there may be “no signs of injustice. No signs but the flames that are filling up the room.” The good warmth that the speaker feels in ‘Stranger’ is the seed of the wicked flames that he fears elsewhere throughout the album. That is, in part, what keeps him walled off from others, what keeps him from commitment.
Still…
Still, he hopes. Still, he sees the purity that he seeks. Still, he believes there is some kind of interpersonal or supernatural force that might help him withstand the perils of relationship and attain the good. He’s just not sure if he can persevere to experience it. Life is still hard.
From top to bottom of the album, the speaker hedges his bets between hope and despair. There is pure goodness in life, and we might work towards it, but there are always going to be snags: “I thought that I was free from all that questioning, but every time a problem ends another one begins.” It is a real struggle to fight against powers that seem destined to keep the world wallowing in its filth: “What’s the point of getting clean? You wear those same old dirty jeans.”
The problem is way, way bigger than any two individuals can deal with. The album recognizes that the world is broken; Father of the Bride confirms that an Edenic vision of goodness and dignity has been corrupted by an original sin that is passed down to all of us. There is a “genocidal feeling that beats in every heart.” Humanity might strive toward solutions for this wickedness, to establish a utopia, to create world peace, but even with the founding of the United Nations and the well-intentioned creation of a peaceful land for the oppressed (namely, the country of Israel, a home for those who share Koenig’s Jewish heritage), this promised world of peace and love has never actually been realized – “A hundred years or more, it feels like such a dream, in endless conversation since 1917.”
“Oh wicked world, just think what could have been.”
What could have been? The speaker still believes that true love and real commitment and familial happiness is possible, but he won’t let himself trust in it wholly. He is always hedging his bets, like the millennial he is. He readily admits, “Baby, I love you, but that’s not enough.” Feelings of love alone won’t ever be enough. There are worldly and perhaps spiritual elements that threaten to keep the relationship doomed.
“I know I loved you then. I think I love you still. But this prophecy of ours has come back dressed to kill.” Remember, baby, the realist and cynic in me told you we were going to fail. Now don’t be surprised…
I mean, it does feel like maybe there is some big, grand plan for us. Doesn’t it? After all, “you’re still mine, [and] all I did was waste your time. If there’s not some grand design, how’d this pair of stars align?”
“We belong together. We belong together! [But], there’s no use in being clever. Baby, it don’t mean we’ll stay together.”
Back and forth. Back and forth. And then back again. Our speaker wavers back and forth incessantly. There is no peace even when things are peaceful because he is smart enough to see the next bad turn coming around the corner. And then his self-fulfilling prophecies affirm his position when life does not go the way he wants it to but the way he planned for it to. His hope isn’t actually hope. He doesn’t have much faith at all. And love? It’s a feeling at best.
His inability to commit has metastasized into a cancerous cynicism and threatens to upend whatever was worth holding onto. He laments his position when, in ‘Jerusalem, New York, Berlin,’ he states with detached disappointment, “You’ve given me the big dream, but you can’t make it real.”
Stop.
It is worth questioning who the ‘you’ is in this line. The answer to that question may be surprisingly illuminating.
The easiest assumption is that he is still talking to his “baby,” which makes enough sense within the lyrics of the song and the album overall. She woke the hope of love that was hiding under his cynical exterior. Still, as ‘Jerusalem, New York, Berlin’ is also obviously referencing the governments and institutions that have made big promises about world peace, similar to the promises made in ‘Married in a Gold Rush,’ the speaker may also be addressing those global forces that should be doing more to make life better for us poor, helpless individuals: another possible reading of the lyrics.
One of the more interesting interpretations, however, is that the speaker may be raising his lament higher than this earthly plane. In ‘We Belong Together,’ one of the pairs of opposites/foils/complements sung is, “We go together like lions and lambs.” This imagery is obviously biblical. In the Old Testament book of Isaiah, the proximity of lion to lamb symbolizes perfect redeemed peace instituted in the Messianic Age. So too in the New Testament book of Revelation, the connection between the lion and lamb symbolizes redeemed peace; however, the Messiah is there literally personified in the person of Jesus, who is both the lion of the tribe of Judah and the perfect sacrificial lamb. By bringing this imagery (in addition to other biblical references) into the album, Koenig is allowing us to keep a loose hold on the possibility that we should be interpreting some of his lyrics religiously and/or spiritually.
We then might hear a lament or a complaint raised to a being beyond the powers of the world. “You’ve given me the big dream, but you can’t make it real.” There is in these lines something of the eternal ache described by religious folks. Apologists and evangelists and religious philosophers of various backgrounds argue that the existential dissatisfaction that defines the human condition is evidence of the reality that we were made for something beyond this world; we can feel it. In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis puts it like this: “If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.”
If there is one thing that other generations should appreciate in the millennial’s indecisive lack of commitment and direction, I would submit that it is precisely our desperate appetite for something more satisfying than we can find in the material world. When we suffer the natural pains of mortal life and relational disappointments, we look skyward and levy our complaints against the mysterious forces that gave us a craving for perfection where no perfection is to be found.
With our eyes still lifted, let’s consider the simplest song on Father of the Bride, ‘Big Blue.’ The lyrics are limited. One verse, repeated four times:
“Big Blue, for once in my life I feel close to you.
I was so overcome with emotion,
when I was hurt and in need of affection,
when I was tired and I couldn’t go home.
Then you offered protection,
so am I learning my lesson,
or am I back on my own?”
‘Big blue’ is similar to the French expletive ‘sacré bleu!’ (translated ‘holy blue!’ i.e. ‘good heavens!’) which is a softening of the curse ‘sacré dieu’ (translated ‘good god!’). So, when the speaker of ‘Big Blue’ utters those words, he could conceivably be speaking to God directly. He is at least referring to cosmic/universal forces generally. Either way, ‘Big Blue’ is an obvious recognition of some supernatural forces (fate, karma, destiny, providence, the laws of nature) that influence and control human affairs. Something or someone the speaker can also feel close to.
So, if the speaker is talking to this same supernatural entity when he says, “You’ve given me the big dream, but you can’t make it real,” what he is doing is complaining that God (whatever his conception of God is) is not following through and fulfilling the needs that he infused into his creation. And if indeed Koenig has surreptitiously snuck these spiritual concerns into what otherwise is an album about disappointed romance, he joins a long list of serious lyricists who have wrestled with the same themes. The millennial’s existential wrestling with the hope and doubt surrounding romantic relationships is possibly evidence of a far more serious struggle between faith and infidelity.
Now, this review may just be a Christian critic reading a spiritual and religious analysis into an album that has nothing to do with any of that. Seriously, I can concede this on Father of the Bride because, unlike many of the previous albums I’ve reviewed, the spiritual/religious themes are far less obvious here.
But if there is some semblance of truth in this review, I would urge the listener to take Father of the Bride and its primary lyricist very seriously. In ‘Stranger,’ the most genuinely joyful song on the album, Ezra Koenig is letting us get the briefest peak into his world. The speaker of the song is reveling in the newfound goodness of a romantic relationship and being invited into the familial warmth of his lover’s home. It is strange to him. It is strange to be around people so loving and welcoming. It is strange, but it is good, and his life is changing.
And if we do not dig in much farther than that, we can be happy to have encountered a nice song. But the lyrics sing:
“You and Kidada.
I might get low, low, low,
but now I’m too high to know.
The sight of you and your sister,
I couldn’t fight these days alone.”
For those who do not know, Kidada Jones is the sister of Rashida Jones, daughters of African-American music icon Quincy Jones and Jewish-American actress Peggy Lipton. Further, Rashida Jones is the girlfriend of Ezra Koenig, with whom she has a one-year old son. So, regardless of what the rest of the album is, ‘Stranger’ is at least semi-autobiographical. Having inserted himself into that one song as the speaker, Ezra Koenig has opened up the possibility for his audience to read him into more, even all of the songs on Father of the Bride.
And if we do that, I would encourage us all to take a very sympathetic view toward what Koenig has revealed in his newest album. If all he is wrestling with is a generational discomfort regarding relationships and his young family, we ought to be very understanding. However, if his struggle does indeed transcend these more mundane concerns and instead ventures into the spiritual and eternal, we should be very seriously praying for him to find the comfort he seeks. May our good God up there in the big blue answer his desperate pleas for eternal satisfaction.
O come, Thou Dayspring, from on high,
And cheer us by Thy drawing nigh;
Disperse the gloomy clouds of night,
And death’s dark shadows put to flight.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.