Vampire Weekend’s Rostam Batmanglij Shares “Upper West Side, 1982″ From This Is Our Youth

Vampire Weekend‘s Rostam Batmanglij has shared a new piece of music titled “Upper West Side, 1982″, which appears on his score for This Is Our Youth, the Kenneth Lonergan play starring Michael Cera, Tavi Gevinson, and Kieran Culkin. Listen to it above.

After a run in Chicago, This Is Our Youth opens on Broadway at the Cort Theatre on September 11, running through January 4, 2015. It chronicles a 48-hour journey in the lives of three disoriented young characters in Reagan-era New York City. It’s directed by Anna D. Shapiro.

Update: Batmanglij has provided a statement about the music:

” Dennis Ziegler, 21 years old
Warren Straub, 19 years old
Jessica Goldman, 19 years old

The play takes place in Dennis’s one-room apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The time is late March, 1982.”

…reads the first page of Kenneth Lonergan’s script for This Is Our Youth. As soon as I read it I thought about myself at that age, I had just moved to upper Manhattan to go to school. A bunch of my time in that period of my life was spent studying piano, and the piano’s this instrument you can find in apartment buildings throughout New York. So it was important for me to write something that could realistically be heard coming down the hall— maybe from an apartment next door to Dennis’s. And it was also important to me that there be a bit of the feeling that a person has maybe come home late at night, in a somewhat altered state, and they sit down at a piano and this is what comes out of them and it’s never existed before.

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