Rostam has said New York mayor Zohran Mamdani’s election represented an “expansion” of “American leadership”.
The former Vampire Weekend multi-instrumentalist and producer is preparing to release his third solo album, ‘American Stories’, on May 15 through his own label Matsor Projects. It is his first LP since 2021’s ‘Changephobia’, and you can pre-order/pre-save it here.
The record finds him exploring his Iranian and American heritage, with his Iranian parents having moved to the US while his mother, cookbook author Najmieh Batmanglij, was pregnant with him. Amir Yaghmai of The Voidz plays the Turkish instrument the saz throughout the album, while there are multiple references to the Israel-Gaza conflict in the record’s lyrics.
In a new interview with The Guardian, Rostam has spoken about how the album sees him wrestle with his relationship with the United States. “My position is different,” he said. “So what is my relationship to the American flag? What is my relationship to American citizenship?”
He said one thing that has inspired him recently is the election of the new Mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, whose Muslim Indian background and progressive left-wing politics have led Rostam to think about “the idea that there’s an agenda to say what is and isn’t American.”
“Zohran’s election is an expansion of what is part of American leadership,” he explained. “That was meaningful to me.”
Despite this, Rostam also said he prefers not to explicitly explain how the new songs have a political inspiration. “I like the idea that someone can approach them while not knowing what’s been going on,” he said. “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?’”
In 2021, Rostam spoke out about a round of Israeli strikes in Gaza, criticising then-president Joe Biden’s response. “No mention of Palestine or the Palestinian people in this tweet,” he wrote in response to a Biden post. “They are the ones who are dying however. They are simultaneously being murdered and removed from the narrative.”
Announcing the new album, Rostam said: “At some point in making this record I realised the album I wanted to make was one that reflected my identity as both Iranian and American. Pushing the most Iranian elements right up against the most American ones brought me a certain kind of joy.
“The first time I put microtonal saz melodies over Western guitar chords, I was thrown off by the way the two rubbed together. But the more I listened the more I became drawn to that rub. I became addicted to it.”
He will be playing a North American tour in May and June, with five European shows including one at London’s Village Underground in September. Find tickets for North America here, and European tickets here.
NME awarded ‘Changephobia’ three stars on its release in 2021, writing: “It’s hard in the increasingly saturated music world to make an album that stands out. Whatever the flaws in some elements of ‘Changephobia’, Rostam can be proud of creating an album that showcases his talent as a producer and is truly unique.”
