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Seemingly a reference to the Wes Anderson movie Moonrise Kingdom, in which the main character Sam paints watercolors that are “mostly landscapes, but a few nudes.”

Dylan himself is an accomplished painter, having created the cover artwork for his 1970 album Self Portrait and The Band’s 1968 album Music from Big Pink.

Bob Dylan’s self-portrait from Self Portrait

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The biblical prophecy of returning to the holy land and the world peace didn’t happen as promised. The three cities in the song represent the three fates of the Ashkenazi diaspora: New York (alive in exile), Jerusalem (back in Zion), Berlin (exterminated entirely).

Koenig laments “what could have been” as a livelier and more humane Jewishness in all three lands.

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Koenig told The Irish Times that his favorite duets contain the personality of both singers and an element of teasing.

Sometimes you hear a duet and you’re like, ‘Aw, come on, they just broke up one song that somebody wrote'. The duets that I really love, like old country duets, are when people talk to each other and tease each other.

Here, Danielle seems to be teasing Ezra for rarely writing about love without couching it in some form of irony or pop culture reference. Much of Father of the Bride shows Ezra breaking through the opaque structure of a traditional VW song to come up with something breezier and more straightforward.

This is also a play on words, as opaque is the opposite of clear in the next line.

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“We Belong Together” is the third and final Danielle Haim/Ezra duet on Father of the Bride. Koenig set out to write a simple love song, and described it as the “most wholesome Vampire Weekend song.” It still has some of the trademark VW knottiness, though – not many country ballads name-drop Keats and Yeats.

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“Jerusalem, New York, Berlin,” references three cities that are important to world history, but are especially important to Jewish identity. Jerusalem is the holiest city in Judaism, New York is the de facto capital for diaspora Jews, and Berlin serves as a reminder to the atrocities of the Holocaust.

Ezra references the three cities to meditate on the significance of “what it means to connect to something bigger than yourself”, then pares this enormous question down to a more personal level.

Ezra told Coup De Main that he picked these three cities because they represent religion (Jerusalem), money (New York), and culture (Berlin).

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Koenig considered this couplet a good indication of where he had evolved to lyrically in an interview with Stereogum. Koenig felt that when he was younger he wrote songs “that either straight-forwardly praise someone or accuse them.” Here, he is a little more empathetic and willing to see both sides of the issue.

What struck me so much about [“This Life”’s] chorus is that there are so many songs that I associate with youth that would be either: You cheated on me so fuck you, or I cheated on you and now I have to deal with myself. There’s something I loved about the simplicity of: Damn, we both cheated on each other. And then I liked the idea of turning it back into what it says about my life in general.”

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It’s possible that this is about the narrator’s soon-to-be ex-lover writing in her diary or writing a note about breaking up. But it’s not a stretch to imagine that the “you” is self-referential and Koenig is talking about himself and his writing process.

There was a 6-year gap between Modern Vampires of the City and Father of the Bride. While some of that was spent touring and working on his anime show Neo Yokio, it’s likely that Koenig spent some time worrying over what direction he wanted to take the band in. To a writer, the sight of a blank notebook can be unbearable.

As VW co-founder Rostam left the band, and Ezra tried to put together a sunnier 4th LP, there are some similarities between the creative process and moving on after a real break-up. This would put “Unbearably White” in the category of songs about moving on as an artist disguised as a romantic break-up, such as Bob Dylan’s “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”.

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Ezra, a native New Yorker, moved to Los Angeles after the release of Modern Vampires of the City. Mulholland Drive and Sunset Blvd. are both iconic streets in L.A.

The homes on Mulholland Drive are located up in the hills. Koenig can see the mansions in the hills falling down, either because of climate change or societal unrest, and asks his lover if they can stop living in a place detached from the regular world.

As Koenig is a film buff with some disillusions about fame, this is probably also a reference to David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive and Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, two famous Hollywood films about the nightmares of chasing stardom.

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The Balfour Declaration came out in 1917. In it, England’s Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour expressed support for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”.

Israeli-Palestinian conflict is still very fresh over 100 years after the declaration. Koenig has spoken thoughtfully about the conflict, considering how much human rights violations and anti-semitism influence criticism of Israeli occupation of Palestine.

Anyone with a brain can see people, both Jewish and non-Jewish, cynically using the charge of anti-semitism in both England and the States. And that doesn’t mean there isn’t anti-semitism — it just means Jewish identity is increasingly fraught. I don’t mean violence is around every corner, just that, when everybody is talking about what it means to be a Jewish person, necessarily the concept becomes a mindfuck

Jerusalem is a city central to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Both Israel and Palestine consider it to be a holy city and claim it as their capital. Until the Trump administration sided with Israel in December 2017 and declared it their capital, foreign nations were unwilling to weigh in on either side as they feared it would spark political conflict.

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Referencing the famous verse: “If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.” (Psalm 137:6) it seems Koenig is willing to pay the price of losing Jerusalem.

Koenig presented Father of the Bride as a “life-goes-on record”, as compared to “the black-and-white album cover with the songs about death”, but the fear of aging creeps into the lyrics here all the same.

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