Vampire Weekend musician Ezra Koenig believes the decline in popularity of guitar music has taken the pressure off fronting a rock band.
The group are set to play at Britain’s Glastonbury festival on Sunday, but the 35-year-old has admitted he thinks guitar-driven music is less relevant to young people today than when the band emerged on the indie scene back in 2007.
“The gods aren’t showing much favour to guitar music, but that makes playing guitar scales at home even more kind of joyful and cool to me,” he told The Guardian. “It’s pretentious to say, but there’s a line from (Roman philosopher) Cato that I always liked: ‘The winning cause pleases the gods, but the losing cause pleases Cato.’ And I’m like: I feel you Cato!”
The Sunflower hitmakers took a break after their 2013 album Modern Vampires of the City, and the musician revealed the hiatus came at a good time, as it allowed them to escape the struggles of their peers to keep up with the changing trends of chart music.
“For a lot of people participating in music then, that was a stressful time, an existential crisis,” Ezra explained. “But a few years later, the vibe was not so much this big existential question, because to me there’d been an answer. Is rock dead? Yes. Are guitar bands relevant? Not particularly. And I enjoyed the straightforwardness of that.”
During Vampire Weekend’s hiatus, Ezra won plaudits for his production work on Beyonce’s Lemonade album, co-writing her track Hold Up. He also welcomed a son, Isaiah, with his girlfriend, actor and director Rashida Jones, last August.
The group returned with their latest effort Father of the Bride in May – a record he said was heavily influenced by his relationship with Rashida, revealing “almost everything that’s been written about the album references my girlfriend and our baby”.
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