How Rostam Made His Best Album Yet Against a Backdrop of Heartbreak and Global Strife

The Iranian-American songwriter and producer, whose first album in five years is called American Stories, worries about leaving “any sense of national identity or pride to people on the other side of the political spectrum.”Anthony MuseWhen I meet Rostam Batmanglij in a cafe in downtown Manhattan, it's 20 minutes after Nowruz, the Persian New Year.“It takes place at the exact moment of transition,” the Iranian-American musician-producer-songwriter says. “It doesn't start on a day. It starts at whatever time [that moment happens].” And this year, it fell at quarter to 11, on a bright spring Friday.Batmanglij—who left the era-defining indie rock band Vampire Weekend in 2016 to embark on an increasingly singular career behind the boards on now-canonical albums like Frank Ocean’s Blonde and Solange’s A Seat at the Table, and as an artist in his own right—has fond memories of celebrating Nowruz growing up.“Everybody holds hands in a circle,” he says. “There's this table that you set called the Haft-sin, and it's seven items that begin with the letter ‘S’ and they each represent different things."Observers of the holiday typically wear new pieces of clothing to mark the occasion, and this year, Batmanglij allowed himself a little treat: “I did buy a Comme des Garçons shirt yesterday from Dover Street Market,” he says, with a sheepish smile.But what should be a day of celebration for the Iranian diaspora has taken on a more somber tone this year. It’s the 20th day of the US-Israel war on Iran and at what would typically be a moment of excitement, as he releases a long-aborning project into the world—American Stories, his first album in five years—Batmanglij is understandably uneasy.“I don't really know how people are going to experience my record, and it's very hard to predict what will happen from one day to the next with this war,” he says.Bowen MorenoDuring that five-year gap between albums, Batmanglij produced Haim’s Grammy-nominated album I Quit, as well as tracks for artists as wide-ranging as Carly Rae Jepsen and his old band Vampire Weekend. Wrapped up in ruminations on love and midlife, the album also sees Batmanglij—a queer, first-generation Iranian-American—taking stock of the increasingly hostile American political landscape. It’s his best album yet.American Stories finds Batmanglij intertwining modes of traditional American music with elements of Iranian and Middle Eastern music, the apotheosis of a project that started on his debut Half-Light, on songs like “Wood,” which incorporated thousands-year-old melodies in the foundational Persian music mode Rast Panjgah into a queer love song.Batmanglij had been writing songs on and off for years, but it was working with a pedal steel player at recording sessions for the young singer-songwriter Leith Ross that gave him focus. “Once the pedal steel came into the picture, I felt like I had this new insight into American music and the combination of the Middle Eastern and the Persian stuff,” he says. “I didn't just want to marry songwriting with Persian music, I wanted to marry American songs [with Persian music].” With fellow Iranian-American musician Amir Yaghmai, a member of Julian Casablancas’s band The Voidz, he honed in on the material that would eventually become American Stories.One of Batmanglij’s biggest influences is the composer Arthur Russell, whose work spanned modern classical, experimental electronic music, disco and New Wave, and the music on American Stories recalls the image on the cover of Russell’s country album Love is Overtaking Me—the avant-garde artist putting on a cowboy hat, queering the most American of genres and taking it to interestingly liminal spaces.Listening to the album, it’s also clear that he’s still processing the demise of a relationship. On the evocative, string-drenched “Hardly,” a wistful breakup song that sees him reunited with Clairo, Batmanglij tells the story of a relationship’s afterglow set to the backdrop of a city in motion. “You were working on a painting that you said you couldn’t finish,” he sings on the song. “I said whatever happens I’ll still love the people in it.”It might be a reference to life with his ex-boyfriend James Cherry, an artist known for his work in lighting, who Batmanglij collaborated with on a sound installation called Music to Four Speakers, as part of Cherry’s exhibit at Noon Projects in Los Angeles in 2023. The disintegration of that relationship seems to bleed through the album in quiet, delicate ways, although Batmangjli is reluctant to get into specifics.“I think if this record was solely a breakup album or solely a political statement, it would be fatiguing—not just for the listener, but for me,” Batmanglij says. “In some ways, it's like a collection of songs that reflect back on a moment in my life. I did have a major relationship in my life that ended. That was part of my experience as a human being.”To help him tell that story, he enlisted Tobias Jesso Jr., the Grammy-winning songwriter tapped by artists like Adele and Haim to help bring their most personal songs to life. Batmanglij already had about half of the music and lyrics for “Back of a Truck”—a country-rock stomper about how songs on the radio might remind you of someone you used to love—and “To Feel No Way”—a meditative piano ballad on starting over post-breakup—when he brought Jesso in to help finish the songs.“Our songwriting process is opposite,” Jesso says. “He goes in every different direction, starting even sometimes from production and then going back to the song. He's always like, ‘You like to write songs classically.’ He probably would bring me in to be like, ‘What would the Tobias classic way of writing this be?’ And then his taste would completely take over and go, ‘No, I don't like that. That's too straight and narrow and blah-blah.’”“I was also going through a really tough breakup,” Jesso says, laughing. “And he knew that. Perhaps, he was pulling me in at the perfect time.”Still, the larger intent of the project is clear on the album cover, which features an upside down American flag. It’s a presentation that the Left, the Right, and the Native American Land Back movement have all made use of at various points, and on Instagram, Batmanglij presented the cover in lineage with Jean-Michel Basquiat's "Untitled (Flag)" and the LGBTQ Pride flag, among others.“I think I'm interested in the conversation,” he says. “If someone says, ‘America is a perfect country, only display the flag right side up,’ I would say America's never been a perfect country.’ Part of why I wanted to use the American flag and bring that into my project was to say that if people like you and I, if we leave any sense of national identity or pride completely to people on the other side of the political spectrum, there's a danger in that. There's a danger in saying, ‘Well, my parents weren't born in America, I was born in America, but I'm not really an American.’ No, I am an American.”Bowen MorenoThe cellist Hamilton Berry, who’s been playing on Batmanglij’s records since the first Vampire Weekend album, got a hint of the later political arc Batmanglij’s music would take when they first became friends at a composition class in Columbia University. “He was the first person I ever heard say ‘all art is political,’” Berry says. In an era defined by cultural appropriation and the flare of Terry Richardson’s Yashica T4 Super, the college-aged Batmanglij was already thinking about the intersectionality of things. “He definitely knew even then what was up,” Berry says.“He's a very private person in a way and I think maybe in the last decade, he’s recognized that he has more of a platform,” Berry continues. “The political messaging, if it is there in his music, is not overt. If anything, I feel like his music is just inviting reflection about things that are political.”“The really important thing about Rostam is he's always going to give it to you straight whether you like it or not,” Jesso says. “And that's a really unique thing to be in our industry because typically a little people-pleasing will get you a lot further. Because what does it mean? It's like, not upsetting the vibe in the room. Rostam doesn't give a shit about that.”When Batmanglij first became a star in the late aughts as a member of Vampire Weekend, early press centered on the idea of the Columbia University-born band as a preppy, WASP-y foursome. The concept—boat-shoe indie rockers singing lyrics laced with old-money signifiers over music incorporating African soukous and rumba—made for a provocative tension. Lost in a lot of the discourse was the fact that Batmanglij was the son of Persian immigrants who fled Iran right before the revolution.Mohammed and Najmieh Batmanglij first made their way to France, where they claimed refugee status. There, alienated and homesick, Najmieh got the urge to begin writing a cookbook culled from her mother’s recipes. She was not a trained chef nor a food journalist, but she found writing to be an act of preservation, a way to bring her homeland closer. The book eventually came out under a French publisher as Ma Cuisine d’Iran.In 1984, the Batmanglijs—now with their eldest son Zal—made the decision to move to Washington, D.C., believing that a city filled with diplomats from all around the world would prove a more welcoming home for exiles like them. It was there that the Batmanglijs had Rostam. And soon, Najmieh set her sights on a bigger, more ambitious book.Shopped around at a time when anti-Iranian sentiment was rampant in the country, the book that would eventually become Food of Life—Najmieh’s breakthrough and the book that would help put Iranian food on the map in America—encountered steadfast resistance from American publishers. It seemed, if the book was ever going to see the light of day, they would have to publish it themselves.The enterprising Batmanglijs immediately got to work learning the tricks of the trade—Mohammed took a course for editing at Georgetown University while Najmieh learned graphic design. And soon, they established Mage Publishers, an independent press that would make it its mission to share Iran’s heritage with the world. Food of Life was their pilot project and through word of mouth and a tenacious grassroots campaign, it became their first bestseller.Najmieh dedicated the book to her two sons and “and to all Iranian children living far from the country of their heritage by the course of political events.”In his expansive tome Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America, the writer Mayukh Sen calls Najmieh “the country’s most revered authority on Iranian cooking.”“She achieved this purely through her self-published writing, with no television show or restaurant to her name,” Sen writes. “In that early period, Najmieh was effectively a one-woman industry, the lone diplomat of Iranian cooking in America.”Talking about his parents’ independent streak today, Rostam can see that his own indie ethos is a kind of inheritance. “It taught me a lot,” he says, about watching his parents blaze a trail. “Things you want to learn, you can learn at any stage of life—and you can also teach yourself.” Post-Vampire Weekend, Rostam established Matsor Projects, an independent label and publishing company he releases all his music under.“My mom started studying cooking in her 30s,” he says. “My dad witnessed the publishing company in France that published my mom's very first book. When he got to America with my mom, his attitude was like, I saw what the publishing company did in France. They didn't do a whole lot. We could do it ourselves and we could do it better. I think they truly were an independent publisher in the same sense of an independent label. They did everything themselves.”He brought that scrappy DIY spirit to his own nascent career as a musician, making CD-Rs of Vampire Weekend’s early recordings, designing the band’s album covers, sourcing—and sometimes even shooting—the imagery himself. “My dad taught me how to use Photoshop when I was seven years old,” he says. “I worked for him at his publishing house—that was my first job.” (Looking at the covers of his mom’s cookbooks, and the packaging for the band’s first three albums, it’s clear that Mage and Vampire Weekend share a love for sans serifs.)And in the same way that his parents, in the early days of Mage, cold-called prospective customers to sell cookbooks, Rostam would cold-mail David Byrne a CD-R of early Vampire Weekend songs, with the hopes of earning the approval of indie rock’s godfather. “I literally just took the Luaka Bop address down from the internet—Luaka Bop was his label—and I just put ‘David Byrne’ at the top of [the package] and I sent him the blue CD-R,” he says. Those early recordings eventually earned the admiration of Byrne, who blogged about the upstart band in 2007.Over the afternoon I spend with Batmanglij, walking through the Lower East Side, stopping by a camera store, a thrift store, and two cafes along the way, I find him occasionally taking on the pose of indie rock elder statesman—a consequence, perhaps, of being catapulted to stardom fresh out of college. He talks about the privilege of working with talented young artists, his theory that songwriters don’t get better with age, that the best songs often come around the age of 20.Lately, it seems like he’s actively contending with his past. In February, he released what he called the original version of “Campus,” a track on the first Vampire Weekend album, accompanied by a YouTube video where he called the album version “a kind of adaptation of a strings version of the song that was never finished.” It was his way of tying up loose ends, finally bringing the version-that-never-was to fruition, as well as a show of solidarity with students protesting at Columbia and around the country. Over half of the single’s proceeds would be donated to non-profits supporting Palestinian and Sudanese relief.Vampire Weekend on top of the world in 2013, the year the band topped the charts with their album Modern Vampires of the City. Left to right: Ezra Koenig, Rostam Batmanglij, Chris Tomson, Chris Baio.David Corio/Getty ImagesThe last few years have seen legendary rock bands like Phish and Dead & Company doing unlikely Vegas residencies, filling up the Sphere in the way glitzy showbiz legends like Celine Dion and Frank Sinatra once did other Vegas venues. Would Batmanglij ever rejoin Vampire Weekend for a residency at the Sphere? Maybe at 60?“At 60? Wow,” he says. “I saw U2 at the Sphere. It was cool… That’s all I could say.”In any case, Batmanglij still has work to do. “As a producer, it takes a really long time for the through line [of your work] to be seen. For bands, it's like a three-album arc maybe. For a producer, you're kind of on a 10-album arc, right?” he says.“[America is] a wonderful place for the stateless,” Najmieh told The Washington Post in 1993. “In exile, you become so much more conscious of your culture, and ours is so beautiful.”During a time of intense diasporic grief, her son is similarly, defiantly hopeful, deeply indebted to the culture that raised him while remaining a firm believer in the American project—the version of the country that provided a sanctuary to Najmieh and Mohammed when they migrated in the ‘80s.Batmanglij moved out of New York at the end of 2013, moving to Los Angeles to focus on music production and his own work as an artist. But recently, he’s found himself drawn back to the city, making plans to set up a studio in downtown Manhattan.“In the last year, what we saw in New York with Zohran Mamdani getting elected, you see an opportunity for the leadership in America to not be corrupted,” Batmanglij says, about the current New York mayor’s exhilarating rise. “I'm hopeful about the future.”“The generation that's younger than us, they can separate these different strands in ways that, growing up in the '90s, it was harder to do… It's interesting now, we live in an era where it feels like people with power are trying to control narratives more than ever before. But simultaneously, the average teenager knows more about Israel and Palestine.”“It comes from a plurality of voices,” he says. “It's less of a mono narrative, and I think that gives me hope.”Raymond Ang is GQ’s director of editorial operations. Since joining GQ in 2021, he has regularly written about Asian cinema, queer culture and pop music for the magazine. His work has been published in The Wall Street Journal, Vogue, Architectural Digest and Them. ... Read More