Diane Young

Album: Modern Vampires Of The City (2013)
Charted: 50
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Songfacts®:

  • This disorienting ode to an out-of-control girl was premiered by BBC Radio 1's Zane Lowe. Frontman Ezra Koenig told the DJ: "We worked on it for a long time. We went out to LA to co-produce it with Ariel [Rechtshaid]... It's definitely one of our craziest songs."
  • The titular vixen's name is presumably a play on words on 'dying young' and possibly also a reference to the Diane Young Anti-Aging Salon on E 79th street in Manhattan.
  • Koenig explained the song's meaning to NME: "The narrator's voice is critical: 'You're f---ing around doing all this s--t.' But then they have their own doubts: 'I live my life in self-defence. I love the past because I hate suspense.' And that felt very true of a certain type of person - which, sometimes, I think is me – who is ultimately a coward and maybe secretly envious of people who really don't give a f---."
  • The Primo Khan-directed video is set at a Last Supper-esque dinner party that goes awry. As well as the Vampire Weekend quartet, the guest list also includes Santigold, Dirty Projectors frontman Dave Longstreth, Walkmen frontman Hamilton Leithauser, Sky Ferreira, and Chromeo's David Macklovitch and Patrick Gemayel. The latter pair are the duo who get into a shouting match with drummer Chris Tomson.
  • This won Independent Track Of The Year at the 2013 AIM Independent Music Awards.
  • Vampire Weekend had little love for the song's demo, but producer Ariel Rechtshaid saw some potential. He recalled to The Guardian: "We had been working on beautiful down-tempo songs and I felt that the record was missing some high-energy stuff. I'd heard the demo of 'Diane Young' but they'd dismissed it as a boring rockabilly song, so I asked to have a go at it."

    "Rostam and I tag-team: we each take the files and work on them for a while," he added. "The vocal processing in the chorus was something that I did and played for them and they were completely weirded out by it, and so was I. I like to get freaked out and sit with it for a while, and if it doesn't feel totally wrong I would rather take a chance on it than not."

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