Rostam Batmanglij performing with Vampire Weekend (Photo: Paul Bachmann for Live4ever Media)
Rostam Batmanglij – formerly of Vampire Weekend and who spent some of last year recording with Hamilton Leithauser – has confirmed his first solo album.
Half-Light is due on September 8th. “I was struck by the fact that it was a word with a double meaning,” he says of it.
“That felt important to this record. It made me think back to a friend in Japan who told me that the word ‘double’ was becoming more and more popular than ‘half’ for people to describe their split ethnicities.”
“Any person growing up in America with immigrant parents experiences this dichotomy, of feeling both double and half. It’s something a lot of us who identify as queer experienced growing up as well, slipping between straight and gay worlds, code-switching. I say ‘experienced’ in the past tense because I don’t know that that’s the experience today’s kids will have. Things are changing.”
A lyric video for Bike Dream is here:
