Rostam Batmanglij has always identified himself as a record producer. “[It’s] my entry point into making music—how I look at making music,” he said. “It’s my language.” His love of production work is the reason. More than a dozen years into his music career, he continues to keep instruments, microphones, and any recording equipment on hand in his home, ready to produce at a moment’s notice: “It’s kind of my philosophy to put everything in one room and make it as easy as possible to record as soon as you have an idea.”
For a long time Batmanglij was a producer and. Aside from being credited on a few tracks alongside Charli XCX and Carly Rae Jepsen, he was a producer and multi-instrumentalist with Vampire Weekend from 2006 to 2016, working on the group’s first three albums. On his respective albums with Ra Ra Riot’s Wes Miles as Discovery and the Walkmen’s Hamilton Leithauser, he was a producer and a cowriter and collaborator. With his debut album, Half-Light, he was a producer and a solo artist. “My name was somehow attached to the project in every one of those six albums,” said Batmanglij.
The year 2019 has been different. He worked on a single song, “We Belong Together,” but Vampire Weekend’s Father of the Bride is largely the band’s first album without him. It’s also been the year, however, that Batmanglij has further embraced his singular identity as a producer and subsumed himself in other people’s work. Take Clairo’s debut album, Immunity, on which Batmanglij said he is a producer on every song…and that’s it. “It really felt right with this project,” Batmanglij said. “And it made me realize that that is a role I really love doing and I want to continue to do, which is to really help artists craft a full-length—a collection of songs that works together—and for my role to be the producer, and to bring out the most in the artist.”
He was also part of the production team for Haim’s forthcoming third album, which features the single “Summer Girl.” Batmanglij looked back at that song and his other producing work this year,
providing some behind-the-scenes commentary on his collaborations as well as the relationships he’s managed to cultivate and maintain through a shared love of music.
“Fallingwater” by Maggie Rogers, Heard It in a Past Life
So Maggie, just by coincidence, has the same management as Hamilton Leithauser. And I’d been working with him—we had just put out a record we made together, [I Had a Dream That You Were Mine]. And so we were doing a show where we played the record live for the first time ever. And somehow either Maggie had asked or maybe her management had thought it might be a good idea for her to sing the song “1959” with us, a track that featured Angel Deradoorian on the record. That was the first time I met Maggie, but I was aware of her because of “Alaska.” I remember being at a party and someone said, “Have you heard this song? It’s kind of like EDM with nature sounds.” And when I heard that description, it sounded like the worst song in the world. There’s no way this song could possibly be good. But of course, it turns out, it’s an amazing song. And I contributed to one of the many millions of people who streamed that song the weekend that it came out. And so she was on my radar and I really liked what she was doing. So she and I stayed in touch. She sent me her E.P. And I told her, “I really love this. If you’re in Los Angeles, we should get together and maybe we could write something.” We started working on “Fallingwater” the first day that we ever got in the studio. She had the foundation of the song. She had the melody and lyrics over different chords, and when she came to the studio, she was singing them and I just started playing the piano, and playing the chords that are now in the song. She started singing over the chords I played, and the two things really fit together in this new way. And I think she was singing higher than she ever sang, maybe, and she wasn’t totally comfortable. And I was just like, “Let’s record it, and we can always make it lower if we need to.” But that was kind of the beginning of “Fallingwater.”
I think it’s rare that somebody sort of documents their ideas so much, but Maggie definitely does that. She writes her lyrics by hand and she sort of writes notes to herself on her phone. And one of her notes was about this dream she had. And in the dream she sort of describes everything that’s happening at the end of “Fallingwater.” And when she played it back for me, when she started humming the line that kind of marks the beginning of the coda, in my head I was like, This is awesome. But there’s one problem. It’s a lot slower than the rest of the song. And I think my brain just started to see that “problem” not as a problem but this opportunity to slow down the whole song. And if we could do it right, if we could kind of pull the rug out from under you and slow down the song without anyone noticing, then we would accomplish something kind of unique.
So Maggie had it all mapped out at that tempo, and instead of trying to speed it up to the rest of the song, I kind of went with it and started slowing everything down, but keeping some of the same drum sounds and keeping a sustained drone that kind of ties the two together. And so when that hum comes in, my goal was that you wouldn't notice. It feels like it’s violating some of the rules of pop, which is what we wanted. We wanted to make a song that broke some rules.
“We Belong Together” by Vampire Weekend, Father of the Bride
So that idea was one of, like, four ideas that Ezra [Koenig] and I started in Martha’s Vineyard in, I think, April 2012. Our friends in Grizzly Bear, they only work by taking these trips where they get away from their normal life and they sort of seclude themselves. So we were at the stage with writing the songs for Modern Vampires where we felt like we had so many great songs, but we just wanted a few more. So we took this trip to Martha’s Vineyard in the off-season and we stayed at our friend’s place in Chilmark. And it was still a little bit cold. It doesn’t become a vacation spot until about June. It’s kind of empty, but it’s still beautiful. So we spent about two days just trying to make songs as quickly as possible. And one of those songs started in the form of an acoustic guitar riff that I played on a 12-string acoustic guitar, and a drumbeat. And that’s still in “We Belong Together.” In fact, that guitar was recorded in Martha’s Vineyard. It never changed. And then Ezra and I got back in the studio together—it’s crazy to say—maybe three or four years later, and he was like, “Remember that idea? I’ve been working on this other song that I just wrote on the piano and I think if we combine those two ideas, it would make a cool new song.” So that was kind of the Frankenstein of putting that song together.
Ezra had an idea to have three duets on the album even before the album was in the trenches of recording. I think it was sort of a conceptual idea. And from the outset of us working on that song, he was like, “I think this will be one of the three duets.” So from my perspective what I wanted to do was to take up the task so that you could hear both of their voices distinctly but also in harmony. My way of solving that problem was to pan one of them all the way to the right and one of them all the way to the left. If you listen with headphones and take one ear off during the chorus, you’ll hear most of one, and if you take the other ear off, you’ll hear most of the other.\
[Working with Ezra again] didn’t feel different. Sometimes we would spend three or four hours talking about politics instead of working on music. And I think that’s going to happen with anybody that you work with. You have music as a shared interest. In some ways it was different. Certainly what was different for me was to no longer be responsible for producing the entirety of a Vampire Weekend album, which I really did look at as a full-time job, you know? Whether we were in the midst of the hell weeks when you’re finishing a record, you’re not sleeping until there’s a final master. I think it was a necessary step to make because I was proud of the three records that we made together. And at the same time I felt like I wanted the opportunity to open up and very much not write the future in stone, to live with this ability to come together in the unit of a song or album going forward and not feel the future’s written. I think everybody’s creative relationships are unique. It can be hard to know what early decisions you make will lead to when you’re 22.
Immunity by Clairo
Someone had told me about her music almost two years ago at a party. And then when I went home, I looked up her Spotify page, and I just found myself looping the song “Flaming Hot Cheetos,” just listening to it over and over again hearing something in her voice that was very familiar, and in a way comforting. I liked how she delivered every line in this sort of carefree way.
So then on Instagram, like, I saw that she had actually posted something about one of my songs on her story, and then we started communicating. And the first thing she said to me was, “Your album changed my life.” And I said, “Which one?” And she meant Half-Light, my solo album from 2017. I was surprised in a way because that was more of a recent album, and I didn’t expect that a recent album would affect anyone. With all albums it takes time for them to get under your skin. But we just stayed in touch on and off and eventually she was in L.A., and we ended up having dinner and that night we made “Feel Something.”
We kind of blocked off a week to write together in November. For her she was making, I think, another six-song E.P. And then that week all these songs came out of us working together, and she started to feel like she wanted to make an album. She kept booking time at studios on her own and booking time with me. And then eventually we got to a point where it felt like there was a whole album that would make sense for us to work on together. So Immunity is half songs that she and I started together and it’s half songs that she started on her own and brought to me and we figured out the production. It was kind of a new way for me, where there was this framework that she had created and it was my role to build off of the foundation that was there.\
And I loved working on the record in that way. I loved that there were these songs that had come from such different places, coming from her writing over beats that I had made and songs that she literally sat with an acoustic guitar and wrote on her own, and then us having this joint task of sitting together and making all of them sound like an album.
“Summer Girl” by Haim
I met Danielle [Haim] years and years ago. I think I ran into her at a festival in Portugal when she was playing in Julian Casablancas’s band. Then I think one day we were getting breakfast together, and she mentioned how she got called into trying to write some ideas for Rihanna, and she asked me if I wanted to go and see what it was about. I think that’s a pretty low-stakes way to start a creative relationship, because the chances that whatever you write together will even be heard by Rihanna are pretty slim.
I think as a producer, you’re always sort of questioning if what you’re contributing is something that an artist loves and elevates a song. And you always want to be kind of surprising yourself. Like I remember the day that I added the saxophone line to “Summer Girl.” I remember turning around and looking at Danielle and expecting her not to like it. And I was really surprised when she liked it. And I was also kind of pleased that it felt like something new in the context of music that I had made in my life too. I think that’s kind of the perfect mix, where you do something that you’re not sure about, you feel like you’re taking a risk, and then you turn around and look at the artists that you’re collaborating with and you can read the expression on their face if they like it or they hate it.
I think what was interesting about that song was that [producer] Ariel [Rechtshaid] really didn’t understand it. The version that Danielle and I had made together, almost everything that you hear now in the song is there, except for the bridge. And when Ariel and Danielle got together to work on the song, I think he was kind of trying to understand what it was about. And I think it was hard for him to understand what it was about because it was about him. And I think the two of them, in writing the bridge together, what that did was sort of unlock a lot of the meaning that was under the surface and so subtle.
[With Haim] there’s a musicality there that speaks to me and it’s something that I identify with. I think it’s an important part of songwriting that oftentimes in this era—I think musicality sometimes seems so divorced from songwriting. There are songs out there in the world which, in some ways, seem so unmusical. And I think that Haim as musicians and as songwriters are kind of an antidote. That’s something that resonates with me.