Vampire Weekend Penned 'Cousins' After Tow-Truck Debacle

Although they may have been feeling sentimental when writing their new album 'Contra,' not everything went so smoothly for Vampire Weekend. In particular, the single 'Cousins' was born during an unfortunate trip to one of New York's outer boroughs. "That song started with a guitar riff that I came up with. I remember playing at Guitar Center with [drummer Chris Tomson] in Queens and our car got towed. So, it was a little bit of a nightmare," Ezra Koenig told Spinner at Vampire Weekend's recent Sessions taping.

"It's such a scam," he says. "There's all these big box stores surrounding this one parking lot, so you're like, 'I'll park it in this lot,' and then the second you leave your car, there's a guy watching you. So you walk into Guitar Center, and the guy sees that you're not going into K-Mart or whatever and immediately they tow your car. You come out, 10, 15 minutes later, and ask 'where's my car?' Then the guy comes up, and says 'We towed it.'"

Even as this experience would leave a sour taste in anyone's mouth, the riff that Koenig came up with didn't escape them when it was time to start thinking about new songs.

"About a year and a half later, we'd worked out a groove to this song because I'd keep playing the song in sound check," Koenig continues. "Chris [Tomson] and [bassist] Chris [Baio] came up with two very distinct grooves, and one of them is the surfy one where Chris is wailing in the snare and then the other one is like, I don't even know how to describe it. I've seen people trying to describe it, and they're not doing such a good job either, but a very original groove from the drums and the bass. We had those raw materials and then when we went to Mexico, we decided we should record it. We recorded it in Mexico City, we debuted it a couple days later in Guadalajara and now it's on the album."

While there's no word on how long it took to get the car from the impound lot, it sounds like even with predatory tow trucks causing them frustration, Vampire Weekend still managed to come out on top.