Ezra Koenig explains Jewish history behind recent Vampire Weekend song – The Jewish News of Northern California

Vampire Weekends singer and songwriter Ezra Koenig has teased inprevious interviewsthat his latest album, the Grammy-nominated Father of the Bride, contains some Jewish content. The band has also put out music videos recently that involveJewish delisand aPassover seder.

But now Koenig has gone in depth about the Jewishness of the albums lead single, Harmony Hall, which contains a lyric that has vexed many until now: Beneath these velvet gloves I hide/The shameful, crooked hands of a moneylender/Cause I still remember.

As Koenig explained for an episode of theSong Exploderpodcast this week, the track explores the cycles of gaining and losing power in his words, the people outside the palace becoming the people inside the palace. Among other things, the term Harmony Hall was a popular name for plantation buildings in the pre-Civil War South. But Koenig connects the idea to Jews and Zionism.

I wouldnt say the songs particularly about being Jewish, but because Im Jewish and Im American Im gonna think about American history and Im gonna think about Jewish history, he said.

The moneylender line is a clear reference to Jews, who were once global outcasts and were forced into working in finance, being restricted from other industries. But they eventually established a state for themselves, and now, in Koenigs eyes, are partly the powerful ones in the drivers seat.

When I think about that phrase, the moneylender, it just makes me think about the past and shame, and how sometimes people in power, regardless of what their background is, or their ethnicity, even though they have more power than they used to, because of trauma or shame sometimes make decisions that are based in fear, he said. In some ways thats one of the drivers of these kind of vicious cycles that we have as people.

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Ezra Koenig explains Jewish history behind recent Vampire Weekend song - The Jewish News of Northern California

Reviewed and Recommended by Erik Baquero