Rostam announces debut album 'Half-Light'
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Half-Light, the debut album from Rostam, will be released September 8, 2017. Rostam is known for his work in Vampire Weekend and produced each of their three albums. His kaleidoscopic debut album features fifteen songs that were written, produced, and performed by Rostam in his Los Angeles home studio.
“It wasn't until I had almost finished this album and was trying to decide what I should call it that I took the time to look up the word ’half-light’,” Rostam says of the album’s title. “I had never stopped to figure out what that word meant exactly. But when I read its definition, and found that it had a double meaning—that it referred to both dawn and dusk—I started to think of how those times of day are part of so many lyrics on this album.” “I was also struck by the fact that it was a word with a double meaning. That felt important to this record. It made me think back to a friend in Japan who told me that the word ’double’ was becoming more and more popular than ’half’ for people to describe their split ethnicities. Any person growing up in America with immigrant parents experiences this dichotomy, of feeling both double and half. It's something a lot of us who identify as queer experienced growing up as well, slipping between straight and gay worlds, code-switching. I say experienced in the past tense because I don't know that that's the experience today's kids will have. Things are changing.”
Grammy Award-winning songwriter and producer Rostam Batmanglij was born to Iranian refugee parents in Washington, DC in 1983. He attended Columbia University, where he studied classical music and simultaneously focused on songwriting, recording, and production in his own time. In his last year at Columbia, he began producing the first full-length album of his career, Vampire Weekend's self-titled debut. At the beginning of 2016 Rostam announced his departure from Vampire Weekend. By the end of that year he had contributed songwriting and production to some of albums of the year—including Frank Ocean’s Blonde, Solange’s A Seat At The Table, and worked on a collaborative album with The Walkmen’s Hamilton Leithauser.