![]() They’re capable, fun performers who throw themselves into songs by Britney Spears, Neil Young, and Donna Summer. John Early and the Lemon Squares, the band at the center of Early’s new HBO comedy special, Now More Than Ever, is pretty decent as a cover band. Things are gonna stay strange.Early in Now More Than Ever, a cover of a concert documentary of a cover band featuring a comedian covering millennial jadedness. My partner and I are learning to flow instead of resisting change. While FOTB guided me through my feelings during my transition to fatherhood, my daughter is teaching me that happiness is not a final state. ![]() Covid lockdowns only exacerbated this unpredictability and the sense of a shrinking world. Hard-earned solutions give way to new challenges – to quote Harmony Hall, “But every time a problem ends / Another one begins”. Just when you catch your breath after overcoming a sleep regression, she catches a string of colds at nursery. Navigating new parenthood is playing a constant game of catch up. If anything teaches you to embrace change, it’s having a child. (I’m convinced I see a subtle, knowing smile when we play it for her now.) I insisted on Stranger as the baby’s daily “womb song”, so she might recognise it once she entered the world. I had a “Father of the Child”-themed Zoom party in the first lockdown, with friends taking on the album’s jam-band philosophy to create bootleg “FOTC” T-shirts. The album began to occupy a symbolic, almost spiritual place in my journey. ![]() In the warm embrace of Stranger’s chorus (“I remember life as a stranger / I-I-III, but things change”) I could see that with a little luck and a lot of work, fatherhood might bring a sense of perspective and contentment that, if I let it, it would allow me to be vulnerable and have intense conversations about personal failings, relationships and love. An ode to domestic bliss, Stranger captures the turn in the story where the protagonist begins to understand the beauty and belonging of family life. If there was a moment where this all came together, it was somewhere in the third trimester, in the moment where We Belong Together fades into Stranger. It gave me a way into discussing my own fears. The more I listened to FOTB, the more I could hear the underlying melancholy in the deceptively upbeat tracks. On a hobby radio show I host with two friends (partly inspired by Koenig’s own Time Crisis), we often use songs as a way of talking about difficult things – loss, depression, dreams – without feeling too exposed. Like many men, I hadn’t cultivated the language to express uncomfortable and confusing emotions. But it wrestles with issues that become knottier and more acute as you settle into your 30s: love, pain, uncertainty. It isn’t specifically about fatherhood (Koenig has said much of the music was written before his partner Rashida Jones became pregnant) – the lyrics allude to everything from the climate crisis to world politics. It required patience and repeated listens: as my own journey unfolded, I found a story and completeness. An 18-track double album, it may seem more scrapbook than statement. ![]() As in the music, there were stormy feelings lurking just beneath the surface.įOTB is an unlikely candidate to transform a life. When the FOTB tour came to London that November, I clung desperately to the album’s sunny sounds. ![]() I was gripped by fears of losing myself, my freedom and precious image – and turning into a dad. Life had taught her to adapt to change with determination and almost undiscerning optimism my approach was one of avoidance and dread. My partner and I, two hopeless romantics living in different cities, would need to turn our idealised relationship into a more grounded plan. Shortly after its release, the news that I was to become a father undid my relatively carefree existence. But it wasn’t until their 2019 album Father of the Bride that their music shaped who I became. Dissecting Ezra Koenig’s layered lyrics, I was always able to learn something about who I was at the time. The evolution, on their first three albums, from the youthful naivety of campus life to late-20s world-weariness and existential angst, was in step with my own rhythms. Vampire Weekend has always been there for me. ![]()
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