Koenig tuning his guitar. “What’s up, here we go again!” he yelled over the noise of a passing fire truck. You can understand why the band wanted to change things up before the Garden. Vampire Weekend played their first show nearly two decades ago, and lately they’ve been trying to make the experience of playing their seminal hit “A-Punk” “fun and fresh every night,” as Koenig puts it. “I think this is definitely our best tour,” he added. They’ve been deconstructing and reconstructing mass concerts on several tours now, and the current set is the most experimental, peppered with surprising jam-band romp like “Cocaine Cowboys,” a song with The twangy tour, which combines the crowd-pleasing “Married in a Gold’ Rush” with tracks from The Gatling Brothers, The Flying Burrito Brothers, the Grateful Dead and Phish. Ends each night by audience demand; Wednesdays at Charlottesville, they attempted covers of “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” “Can You Feel the Love Tonight,” “In the Airplane Over the Sea,” “Funkytown,” “Fire on the Mountain,” “Here Comes “The Sun and “La Vie en Rose.”
The orchestra politely declined some suggestions. “We have a lot of young people who need Chappell Roan and Playboi Carti,” Koenig told me. “With all due respect, you don’t want to hear Playboi Carti from us. But you might want to hear ‘Take It Easy’ by the Eagles.
On “Time Again,” everyone just wanted to hear the hits, and with no set list, the quartet happily performed “A-Punk” and “Oxford Comma” while the Citi Bikers pulled up On the street corner, locals are returning home from work. “We didn’t really invite anyone,” Despot told me, until a few hours ago, when he was worried that no one would show up, and he sent some text messages to call out members of the Volkswagen Extended Universe, such as Dev Hynes. , Aaron Maine of Porches, comedian Brandon Wardell and local indie band Rebounder.
