The Vampire Diaries

Vampire Weekend: ‘I Stand Corrected’ + Standing corrected + NYC dreaming + Magazine scheming + Jews on horses

Seventeen years ago, a band without an album to its name soundtracked my starry-eyed move to New York and entry into the world of magazines. The band blew up. Magazines… not so much. 

Paid subscriptions — $5 per month, $50 per year — are what keep Tracks going. Writing and editing are my only sources of income.

🚨🚨In order to keep going at this pace and growing the project, I’M LOOKING TO ADD 50 PAYING SUBSCRIBERS THIS MONTH.🚨🚨

Telethon Style August Progress Meter: 0/50.

Consider upgrading. If you already have: thank you!

In the fall of 2007, a few months out of college, I packed two suitcases, left the house where I’d grown up, got a ride to the Amtrak station in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and took the train to New York City. A childhood friend came along to help me get settled. Neither of us had ever lived in a real city before. I’d been to Manhattan maybe seven times. From Penn Station we caught a taxi to downtown. I watched the city out the window, simultaneously recognizing nothing and finding it all vaguely familiar from the movies. 

Our Rastafarian driver asked where we were from. “Ah, Pennsylvania,” he said, nodding knowingly. “That’s where they’ve got those Jews.”

My friend and I asked each other with our eyes if we had any idea what he was talking about.

We didn’t.

“Those Jews,” the driver said again. “Those Jews on horses!”

He let us out at Sixth Street, between Second and Third Avenues. It was only as we were getting out of the cab that I realized he was talking about the Amish. 

---

The Sixth Street place was an old tenement apartment. No shower. A bathtub in the kitchen, with a removable top that let it function as a table when you weren’t bathing in it. I was not-quite-legally subletting it from T, whom I’d met on an “alums in New York” listserv set up by my college. This was the same apartment, T told me, where he’d lived after graduating in 1976, when there had been crack vials on the street. Though he’d moved out long ago, he’d held on to the place as a sort of personal clubhouse, filled with guitars and crystals and other Seventies ephemera. Posters for poetry readings. A Japanese sword. It was dusty and dark, but it was in Manhattan, walking distance from work, and mine, all mine, for less than I’ve ever paid in rent anywhere since.

My friend and I walked to the K-Mart on Astor Place, bought cleaning supplies, and went to work on the apartment’s archaealogical layers of filth. While we worked, we listened to music. There was a decent stereo in the apartment, but I’d failed to bring the right audio cord to connect my computer or iPod. I probably could have gotten one at K-Mart, but instead we listened again and again to the one CD I’d happened to bring, a blue CD-R with just two words written on it: VAMPIRE WEEKEND. 

The band, which didn’t have an album out yet, had sent the disc to college radio stations around the country, and somehow I’d ended up with my school’s copy. Maybe I’d been meant to write the station’s in-house review. But I never did, then failed to return it before graduation. (Apologies to Swarthmore College WSRN 91.5.)

I loved that blue CD-R. The songs were crisp and catchy and witty and sounded like they’d been made by people my age who’d grown up listening to the same music I had. Or, at very least, a lot of Paul Simon.  From the start, I was especially taken with “I Stand Corrected,” which had lyrics about facts being checked, about corrections, about protocols. I’d moved to New York for an internship in the fact-checking department at a storied American political magazine. My hope was to start down a career path, and by doing so start figuring out the type of writer I was meant to become. If I squinted, the song looked like it had been written just for me.

The next weekend, Vampire Weekend played free show in my neighborhood. When they played “I Stand Corrected,” it felt like a green light, urging me to press the pedal and go. They’d taken their influences, made something new, and were putting it out in the world. That’s what I wanted to do, too. Right then it all felt possible. 

---

I didn’t know, of course, that Vampire Weekend would soon blow up, becoming the breakout indie rock band of 2008 and beyond. I didn’t foresee the backlash they would spark – how put off some people would be by Ivy League grads in preppy outfits cheerfully riffing on Cape Cod and privilege while flaunting Afropop influences. I certainly didn’t see that they would be one of the few buzzy bands of the late 2000s to endure, weathering the backlash and ditching the preppy shtick, playing to bigger and bigger crowds full of people who found in their songs a record of their own twenties and thirties.

Something else I didn’t see coming: the near total-collapse of magazine journalism. Working at magazines – checking their facts, assigning and editing their articles, writing them – was as rewarding as I’d imagined, and it did, indeed, help me explore the type of writer I was meant to be. I’m not sure I ever would have finished my first novel were it not for experiences that magazines created for me. But year after year, the profession became an increasingly unrealistic way to make a life. It took me a long time to accept this, and even longer to act on that acceptance and start making other professional plans for myself — plans that I’m basically happy about, even if they’re inevitably tinged with loss. (To any of my regular editors reading this: please rest assured that I’m still available for assignments!) After all, somewhere inside I’m still that excited 22-year-old at the East River Bandshell, feeling “I Stand Corrected” launching me into my future.

---

Time passes. I’ve been telling the “Jews on Horses” story for 17 years now. Maybe I’m tired of it; maybe I wrote it down here so I could let it go for a while. The K-Mart on Astor Place is a Wegman’s now. The East River Bandshell got demolished in 2021. I haven’t been to New York since 2017. I’d been sent there on a research trip for a magazine story that never ran, which meant I only got half of the agreed-upon fee, which hadn’t been enough to live on anyway.

A couple weekends ago, my wife and I went to a Vampire Weekend concert here in Chicago. This time it wasn’t a free show from a quartet of friends riding high on college radio buzz, but instead a massive production at a “pavilion” named after a bank, with some 15,000 people in attendance. The band was bigger, having added touring members to play its newer, bigger songs, and help them fill bigger spaces. Between the babysitter, a parking spot, decent seats, and a couple canned drinks, we spent an amount that, back in my early New York fact-checking days, would have covered a week or two of non-rent expenses. It was worth every penny to sing and dance and get pulled back and forth through time in the company of thousands of strangers feeling the same way.

In the days before, looking at the band’s recent setlists online, I’d convinced myself it was likely they would play “I Stand Corrected” in Chicago, giving me a chance to celebrate how I’m still at it, still writing. And then they didn’t play it. Oh well. Great show anyway. Maybe next time. Maybe not! ✹

---

I keep a running list of books by or featuring Tracks contributors at Bookshop.org. Whenever you buy a book using a link from a Tracks essay, or from one of my Bookshop lists, I receive a small commission.

---

Airwaves

• I’ve been trying to write this installment for a while, but whenever I tried, it wouldn’t really stick together. I got a big assist from “Finders, Keepers,” a show on WHPK 88.5, the University of Chicago student / community radio station. The show has a pretty Tracks-esque conceit, with guests picking songs and talking through the memories they stir up. Also: The hosts are Tracks readers (!), and a couple weeks ago they invited me on. I talked about Broken Social Scene’s “Superconnected” (which I’d already written about) and also “I Stand Corrected,” in hopes it would help me get my thoughts in order. I had a great time:

• I’ve been told there are some quality problems with the recording but that it’s listenable. I did college radio myself, and the ramshackle studio space really took me back. I talked about a lot about the 2000s “indie” moment and felt very old. Also, while randomly flipping through piles of CDs I came across the station’s in-house review of the first VW album. “Howdy, hypemonster!" What have you for us today?”

Special thanks:

• to Teddy Brown, who read an early draft and pointed out that I’d misremembered the Astor Place K-Mart as a Target, ugh.

Elsewhere in my running autobiography:

• listening to Paul Simon at Occupy Wall Street

• listening to The Walkmen while I persevere with writing