This week on the Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend podcast, Vampire Weekend frontman Ezra Koenig feels cautiously optimistic about being Conan O’Brien’s friend.
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On the latest episode of the Conan O'Brien Needs A Friend podcast, host Conan O'Brien and the crew sit down with Ezra Koenig, lead vocalist and guitarist for the GRAMMY Award-winning band Vampire Weekend, to discuss producing the band's first album while teaching full-time, looking to artists like Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen for inspiration, how everything changed for artists in the era of streaming, and which of his albums contain the most psychoactive compounds.
“The first time I met you would have been when I was towards the end of my original show, the 'Late Night' show in New York. I was very excited because Vampire Weekend's first album had come out and it just hit me over the head, in the best way,” Conan explains. “I have very clear memories of being nervous about, ‘I gotta move out to L.A.; There's a lot of unknown stuff coming my way; I'm transitioning out of this job I've had for 16 years.’ Then your guys' album came along and listening to those songs and walking around the Upper West Side of New York and just being so happy, I just love the music so much and then heard that you guys were booked to come on the show and I was excited the way a fan would be excited.”
“I was very happy and you guys came on,” Conan adds, remembering he performed the track “Walcott” with them at Radio City Music Hall during his 2010 tour. “Everyone kept trying to talk to me about the comedy that we were going to be doing, and I was like, ‘Shut up, shut up, shut up. I'm gonna be playing with Vampire Weekend and I gotta get this right.’ You're like, ‘Well yeah, but we're gonna really turn you down a lot, so you don't f*** it up.’ But anyway, that was a big deal for us.”
“It was very meaningful to us too,” Ezra agrees. “Growing up we were huge fans of yours and you really are like our target demographic. You specifically, Conan O'Brien,” he laughs. “No, but even a guy from Boston walking around the Upper West Side… when I think about the early albums and like the imagery and how our kind of like love of the East Coast, or forget about love, just heritage, like an East Coast band.”
Conan also vividly remembers getting to spend time together with their mutual friend – and Ezra’s wife – Rashida Jones. “I remember you guys came over once, we sat out on the deck, we were looking at the beach… I remember you and Rashida brought White Claw and I didn't know what it was. What I remembered is you need to drink a lot of White Claws before you get a buzz.”
“It's not like we drink it often. We must have, I think at the time I was particularly interested in White Claw because that was the summer that there was a stat going around the music industry and probably the beverage industry that White Claw had outsold beer at Lollapalooza that summer. So I think I was like, ‘Well, that's interesting.’”
“Well, I love that your interest in music expands to what will people be drinking who are in the audience?,” Conan jokes.
One of the biggest sticking points for Conan was how Vampire Weekend came out of the gate with a great album, “which you had essentially just made yourself… while you were all working full time jobs.”
“In fact, we experimented with remixing some of the songs to see like, ‘Oh, are we missing some kind of professionalism or something?’ But it just didn't sound as good,” Ezra admits. “The version that came out is not particularly different than how it sounded when we were selling CDRs at our shows.”
Keeping their momentum going became nothing short of an obsession for Koenig, “because I'd been working full time, I was a public school teacher, eighth grade English in New York, and it felt like a big deal to go tell the principal I'm gonna go on tour,” he says. “I taught a full year and I'm like, ‘I'm going on tour this summer, so I don't think I'm gonna come back.’"
“It felt a little bit high stakes to have this brief moment of success,” he adds. “I felt like, ‘Let's keep this going before I have to go back to being a teacher or something. I put a lot of pressure on myself and the whole band to try to get our second album out quickly."
“You really didn't want to go back to teaching… how awful were those kids?,” Conan asks. “I have a lot of affection for the kids, but it was, it was a very difficult job, and also I just felt like we had this rare opportunity.”
Listen to the full episode of Conan O'Brien Needs A Friend -- now streaming on the free Audacy app. Over the years and despite thousands of interviews, Conan has never made a real and lasting friendship with any of his celebrity guests. So, he started a podcast to do just that. Deeper, unboundedly playful, and free from FCC regulations, Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend is a weekly opportunity for Conan to hang out with the people he enjoys most and perhaps find some real friendship along the way.