Vampire Weekend. They are never far from my most listened to artists of any given year and this year I mostly listened to them while playing with my son, who turned two a few weeks ago, while my wife was getting our daughter to bed. Making towers of blocks, pointing out objects in books, batting balloons around, bouncing up and down on daddy’s tummy, getting spun and tumbled. There are certain songs now that are indelibly suffused with the experience of playing or dancing with the kids, mostly silly, slight or joyful songs of the kind that are also within the broad taste range of someone born in 1970.
Spotify has informed me that I was in the top 1% of Vampire Weekend listeners, a super-fan, and this doesn't even capture the fact that I mostly listened to them on youtube. I have learned to enjoy Father of the Bride over the years but mostly I listened to the new album. I don't know exactly what my most listened to track was but I suspect it was this sublimely beautiful song, a song, with its truncated whoops of joy and the choir raising it's voice in a slow, stately euphoria to bridge the dark, that I'll always now associate with the tenderness of soft summer evenings with that little boy, the only son I'll have, and a time in our life that will never return when we were feeling our way through my dusk and his dawn toward each other.
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