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The first song Rostam Batmanglij ever learned to play on guitar was Chuck Berry’s Johnny B Goode, the quintessentially American rock’n’roll hit about being an American rock’n’roll star. “It doesn’t get more American than that,” he says, with a smile.
The 42-year-old superproducer (Frank Ocean, Charli xcx, Carly Rae Jepsen) and former Vampire Weekend member is sitting across from me in a coworking cafe in London, trying to explain the fixation he’s always had with US culture. “My brother was born in France, my parents were born in Iran,” he says. “But I was in my mum’s womb when I first came to America. My position is different. So what is my relationship to the American flag? What is my relationship to American citizenship?”
Those questions come to the fore on American Stories, Batmanglij’s third solo album and best to date. Its gorgeous, linen-y pop songs split the difference between Astral Weeks and Andy Shauf, as Batmanglij sings about love, songwriting and, on the album’s most resonant tracks, the fast-unspooling political landscape. As he was making it, he found himself drawn equally to Persian music and Americana, endeavouring to unify the two. “A good challenge,” he says. It sounds quintessentially American (pedal steel) and Middle Eastern (Amir Yaghmai, a member of the Voidz, plays the lute-like Turkish saz throughout).
The 2025 election of New York mayor Zohran Mamdani, a Muslim Indian democratic socialist, “was coinciding with me finding the laser focus of what I wanted the album to be about.” Although he’s now based in Los Angeles, Batmanglij majored in music at Columbia University – where he joined Vampire Weekend – and lived in NYC for many years. He posted emphatically in support of Mamdani’s campaign. Few American political figures have inspired hate from the right quite like Mamdani, who was born in Uganda and is unapologetic about his left-wing politics. It made Batmanglij think about “the idea that there’s an agenda to say what is and isn’t American,” he says. “Zohran’s election is an expansion of what is part of American leadership. That was meaningful to me.”
The album was written and recorded before the US and Israel’s war with Iran, and Rostam seems more focused on family history than broader Iranian/American relations. But some songs on American Stories seem to reference obliquely Israel’s bombardment of Gaza after the Hamas attacks: “When they burned olive trees / They set fire to the leaves / But the roots are too strong / To let go of where they’re from,” Batmanglij sings on Come Apart. On The Weight, he seems to sing directly to students protesting about their university’s ties to Israel, affirming that they’ve “got courage on your side”.
Batmanglij, who is wearing a distinctive Artists4Ceasefire badge on his blazer, says the songs on American Stories “are a reflection of the last handful of years”, but he won’t be drawn on specific meanings. “I like the idea that someone can approach them while not knowing what’s been going on. There’s a lot of people who don’t. But I don’t think an interview is the right place for them to find out. I want people to say, ‘I love that song!’ Then their best friend is like, ‘Well, you know what it’s about, right?’”
Batmanglij, who has worked extensively with gen Z artists including Clairo and Declan McKenna, believes “younger people have more clarity about what’s going on in the world”. By contrast, he adds: “A lot of people in my generation and older have, I think, deluded themselves.”
It’s been over a decade since Batmanglij left Vampire Weekend to pursue production and his own music full-time. He says he was always confident as a producer – a feeling bolstered by the fact that “the first Vampire Weekend record, the first album I produced, is platinum” – but going solo has allowed him to pursue any weird idea to its natural conclusion. “It could be a bad idea. But I’ll believe in it and want to keep believing in it,” he says. “There is something fun about refusing to give up on an idea.”
One such idea was Hardy, a track featuring Clairo, whose debut album Immunity he produced. He made the beat for the track in 2012, but didn’t know how to build it out until recently. “I spent about two or three years just writing lyrics,” he says, “before I tried to record any vocals.” The resulting song is about trying to write a song – a meta concept that is, he says, “treacherous terrain” for any musician, but somehow it works.
Such is the purview of American Stories: a lot of these sounds and ideas shouldn’t work together, but absolutely do, thanks to Batmanglij’s deft touch. I ask how his parents feel about him making an album partially inspired by their experience of migrating to America. “My mum was like, ‘Why don’t you sing in Persian?’” he says, grinning. “She’ll never be happy!”
