‘American Stories’ review: Rostam’s chamber-folk sob

Halfway through American Stories, the new Rostam album that landed May 15, there’s a moment where the whole record’s project clicks into focus, and I’m worried even his most ardent fans will walk right past it. The song is “Forgive Is to Know,” and Rostam is doing what he’s done his entire career: he’s setting up a couplet you think you know — to err is human, to forgive is divine — and then quietly disassembling it.

“To err is human / But to forgive is to learn.” The classical-canon ending builds and recedes around that pivot, vocals chasing themselves in staggered imitation. Until you realize the whole song has been a sleight of hand. The Alexander Pope you got in school becomes the Alexander Pope you actually need at 42, which turns out to need a complete rewrite.

This kind of gambit — taking received wisdom, sanding off the spiritual self-flattery, putting something more useful in its place — is what Rostam does best. It’s what he did inside Vampire Weekend, where he was the guy with the choir samples and the Chamberlain flute and the harpsichord part that made “I Think Ur a Contra” feel like a hymn instead of a kiss-off.

And it’s what makes the pulse of American Stories so strange.

Part of me wants this album to be louder, sharper, more thesis-driven about Iranian-American identity at a moment of US-Iran open conflict. I want the upside-down American flag on the cover to actually mean what an upside-down American flag means.

But I would also like to gently propose that the smoothness has its own charm, too. American Stories isn’t an album about being loudly Iranian-American at the height of an unjust war. It’s an album about being Iranian-American every other day of your life, which is to say, it’s an album about assimilation as a lived condition rather than a political slogan.

It’s easy to fixate on Rostam’s arguably overplayed rub, as he’s described it. Those microtonal saz melodies pressing against Western chords. Mainly because they’re so intentionally decorative. But perhaps that’s the experience he’s documenting. The Iranian part of you tucks itself under the country guitar. It threads through. You only notice it when you stop and listen for it, which most of the country doesn’t. That is exactly the problem and exactly the song.

Rostam, Rostam, Rostam.

Let’s back up, because the trajectory matters. Rostam Batmanglij has spent twenty years being one of the most quietly consequential figures in a particular strain of indie pop. He founded Vampire Weekend with Ezra Koenig in 2006 and produced the band’s first three albums, which is one of those facts you can either skate past or actually give a second thought.

Skate past it and he becomes a footnote in someone else’s story. Sit with it and you realize that Modern Vampires of the City, an album most critics will eventually concede ranks among the great American records of the 2010s, was substantially the work of a then-29-year-old Iranian-American kid from D.C. who happened to have access to Craig Wedren’s choir samples and an instinct for putting Auto-Tune on Ezra’s voice in a song about mortality.

He left Vampire Weekend in 2016. Since then he’s released two solo records: Half-Light in 2017 and Changephobia in 2021. And he’s produced, among other things, Frank Ocean’s Blonde, Solange’s A Seat at the Table, Clairo’s Immunity, Haim’s Women in Music Pt. III and last year’s I Quit, and Hamilton Leithauser’s I Had a Dream That You Were Mine.

Any record he wants.

That’s a body of production work that, taken collectively, is probably more important than any of his own albums to date. It’s also why the reception of American Stories feels so freighted as it’s happening in real time. The man can make any record he wants. He chose to make this one. What kind of record did he choose?

The answer is an album about being Iranian and American at once. He recruited Amir Yaghmai, the Iranian-American saz player from The Voidz who studied under Hossein Alizadeh at CalArts. Then he hired Daniel Aged for the pedal steel. He wrote songs about driving through New England and shopping at Christmas markets and lying alone at a table on Orchard Street. He put an upside-down American flag on the cover. And yes, he titled it American Stories.

The album indeed turns out to be thirty minutes of mostly hushed chamber-folk, sweet and bittersweet by turns. With Yaghmai’s saz threading through the production at the edges instead of at the center. The response so far seems to be: huh?

Getting half of it half right.

Thirty minutes is brisk for an album with this much conceptual weight on its shoulders. The Iranian-American identity content really does sit more in the production palette than in the lyrics. The Clairo feature on “Hardy” really is short and structurally curious. She shows up only in the third verse, sings for maybe forty seconds, and leaves. If you came to this record expecting “Diane Young” energy and got “Step” energy, I can understand the disappointment.

But let’s be careful, here. There’s no good reason to fall into the age-old complaint of “this record refuses to do the thing I would have done if I were making this record.” Which is the kind of criticism you can apply to any album that has the gall to be specifically itself.

Rostam has been telling us for a decade what kind of artist he is. He’s the guy who put “Step” on Modern Vampires of the City and made every grad student weep into their vintage cold brew. He’s the guy whose biggest solo hit, “EOS,” is a four-minute miniature about heartbreak that sounds like a Brian Wilson outtake produced by Brian Eno. So of coulee American Stories doesn’t hit you over the head with its politics. That wouldn’t be Rostam. Subtlety is his medium. The mallet was never on the table.

The most direct political point.

The complaint with actual teeth is the one about the music itself receding from its premise. The fusion gets smoother as the album goes on. “The Weight,” the closer, is the most direct political track and also the most Western-sounding arrangement until Yaghmai’s saz outro arrives like the album’s last word.

If you wanted the friction to escalate, the record disappoints you on purpose. If you wanted the friction to exist, the record delivers. But it delivers the kind of friction that lives in subtext, in the way a saz melody bends three cents flat against a major chord and resolves into something that isn’t quite either tradition.

You have to listen for it. You have to want to listen for it.

Oh, and the songs.

“Like a Spark” opens the album with one of Rostam’s signature lyrical inversions. The chorus appears, on first listen, to be a love song: “I only ever wanted you to feel freed of it.” On second listen, “it” stays unspecified, and the verses tell you why. The other person is wanted, by everybody, tied up easily. Except by the narrator, who only wants them freed.

In other words, it’s a love song that’s also a song about everyone else being a cage. Rostam’s narrator is the one who declined to participate in the tying. The Astral-Weeks comparison is real, but the song’s actual register is closer to early Sufjan: the lyric you think you understand until you sit with it and realize it’s about something else entirely.

“Back of a Truck” is the album’s most immediate song and its sneakiest. On the surface it’s a sunbaked road song about driving down I-94 after a breakup, with Tobias Jesso Jr.’s co-write giving it a country looseness Rostam has only flirted with before. But the lyric is really a diatribe disguised as a breakup song.

Lyrics belong to the listener.

“Six words from a song you loved / Don’t think twice no it’s all right / Sometimes the words mean what you like.” Rostam is doing a Dylan-quoting Dylan number, but the second chorus swaps in the Supremes — “you just keep me hanging on” — and the bridge openly samples “Like a Rolling Stone” by name.

The song is basically about how lyrics belong to the listener. How the meaning of a song is what the listener needs it to mean in a given moment. “Sometimes the words say what you want.” This is, not coincidentally, the same logic the album extends to the listener about its own ambiguities. You can have the record as breakup music or as identity politics. The text gives you both doors and tells you to choose.

“Different Light” is the record’s secular hymn, and its closest cousin to “Step.” The chorus does a quiet trick with the resurrection imagery. “From dust to dust, to ash to urn / and after all, we’re all return / to wherever we got started from.” Rostam, raised Iranian-American in a household where his father, in his own words, carries a prophet’s name but doesn’t believe, gets to use Christian funeral imagery and a country-gospel chord progression to land at something sneakily Zoroastrian about return and origin.

Easy to undersell.

To that end, the arrangement does the same work the lyric does. It sounds like a Nashville hymn until you notice the saz. Which is exactly what Rostam wants you to notice eventually but not at first.

“Hardy” is an easy song to undersell, partly because Clairo’s feature is shorter than the marketing suggested. But the Clairo verse is still the song’s emotional turn, and shrinking it to forty seconds is arguably a valid craft decision. Rostam spends two verses cataloguing what he carried out of a relationship — “some things you said to me have stuck in my mind / and though I’ll never have the chance to say why” — and then hands the song to Clairo for its only outward-facing gesture.

“If you catch a glimpse of the wicked world / in a moment when kindness starts to fold up / don’t forget that you have an inner light / and my inner light bows to yours tonight.” That bow, that namaste moment from a producer who’d never wear that word, is the song’s weapon. The signature line — “maybe the greatest art is never completed / we only have to leave it knowing we tried” — is also the album’s mission statement. Rostam knows American Stories is incomplete. He’s telling you that incompleteness is itself a lesson.

Rewriting a cliché.

“Forgive Is to Know” is, song-for-song, my favorite thing on the record. The lyric does something I’ve rarely heard a pop song do. It rewrites a cliché in real time. “The thing about forgiveness is that it asks for change / but once you felt a victim, now you don’t see it that way.” Then later: “just because it hurt you, doesn’t mean you’re clear / of the obligation to know the harm you’ve done / all of us are guilty, none of us are innocent.”

Put another way, this is moral philosophy delivered in three-and-a-half minutes. It’s also the song where Rostam’s chorus moves from “to forgive is divine” to “to forgive is to learn,” which is the kind of revision an artist makes when they’ve grown out of the version of themselves who needed the original line to be true.

The imitative voices repeating “I have this hope that we could learn from others” just keep starting over. It’s haunted bliss.

Post-breakup adulthood.

“To Feel No Way” is the album’s lonely-in-New-York song, and it does the thing Rostam does better than maybe anyone working. The chorus is a stubbornly rhetorical question. “How does it feel to start over and alone? / What does it mean that I feel good out on my own?”

He’s not telling you he feels good. He’s asking himself what it means that he does. Sadie keeping a table for him at the restaurant, the bike ride down Archer Street, the table for one on Orchard. This is post-breakup adulthood rendered with a specificity that recalls Carole King’s Tapestry with a NYC zip code attached.

“The Road to Death” is the album’s Cohen impression and its most theologically loaded song. “Jesus Christ is a beautiful idea / doesn’t matter if he was real / my father carries the name of a prophet / but Dad is no believer.” Mohammad is the prophet name in question. The song’s gentleness around that revelation — the offhandedness, the way it’s slotted into a verse about Christmas trees and family trips — is a wonderful trick. The most personal disclosure on the album comes out as a stage whisper.

An olive tree.

“Come Apart” is the record’s emotional peak and the song most willing to be read as the political track many expect. “When they burn olive trees / they survive to the leaves / but the roots are too strong / to let go of where they’re from.” Olive trees, the imagery, the moment of release — it’s all text. It’s also the only song on the record where Rostam lets a single image stand uncommented-on. The previous songs would’ve turned the olive tree into a metaphor for relationships, identity, art-making. This one just lets it be an olive tree. The restraint is itself a stance.

“The Weight” closes the record with the most explicit politics on the album, and the saz outro Yaghmai delivers is the album’s last word. Its first moment of being foregrounded rather than threaded through. “Head high like a halo / warm hands on the pavement / eyes glowing in the heat lamps / calling out a broken government.”

Then later: “bodies blocking up the driveway / car parked in Chicago / unmarked in the walkway / plain clothes on the radio.” This is a protest song about being protested-against, surveilled, photographed by people who don’t identify themselves. “They can force a resignation / but can’t stop information.”

The arrangement builds slowly because the politics build slowly. Rostam’s narrator doesn’t arrive at the protest already enraged. He arrives at it after eight songs of trying to live a private life. And the eighth song ends with the world coming apart, and the ninth song is what happens when you stop trying to live a private life. The album truly earns its ending.

What American Stories is “actually” about.

While listening to American Stories, I cycled through all kinds of meanings. It’s a breakup record. It’s an identity record. A political record. Maybe a folk pivot. Or a fusion experiment. It’s about romance, it’s about identity. At one point, I wondered why I kept assuming those two things are even separable. Especially as the album kept insisting they aren’t.

What I hear when I listen to American Stories is a record about how an Iranian-American gay man in his early forties spends his days. He breaks up with people. He drives around. Goes to Christmas markets with his Iranian-immigrant family who don’t believe in the prophet they named him after, or at least don’t believe in him the way they were supposed to.

He thinks about death because he got COVID three times and a partner mentioned offhandedly that his immune system is on a clock. Notices when olive trees burn, half a world away, and notices the ones in his peripheral vision in Los Angeles. Goes to a protest about a broken government. He writes a song about each of these things. Then he sequences them in an order that lets you understand, by the end, that they’re all happening to the same person.

A long therapy session.

And that person’s life — like every American life — is more various than any single political read can handle. The Iranian-American identity content mirrors the way identity lives in a real adult life. Thirty minutes is the running time of a long therapy session. It’s the running time of an Iranian-American man briskly telling you about his last year. Without the over-explanation that long-form personal narrative tempts every artist into.

Rostam uses the songs to tell you what he saw and what he felt and lets you do the connecting for yourself. He resists, on every single track, the temptation to over-narrate. That restraint is rare. It’s also the thing he’s been doing since he was producing Vampire Weekend in his dorm room.

Quiet and proud.

I think American Stories is the best Rostam solo record by a small margin, which is saying something given that Half-Light contained “EOS” and Changephobia contained “These Kids We Knew.” It’s also the record where, for the first time, the producer-genius and the songwriter finally agree on what they’re trying to do, and where the album-length statement actually coheres into something larger than its parts.<p>Is it the loud, dialectical, anguished record about Iranian-American identity at the height of a US-Iran war that everyone seems to have been waiting for? It isn’t. Should it have been? I don’t think so. We have plenty of artists making loud political records. We have very few artists making records this quiet about politics this loud, and the quietness is the form of intelligence the record has to offer.

American Stories trusts you to do the work. It treats the listener as a collaborator. That trust is, all by itself, a politics.

The bottom line.

The album loses a point with me for the brevity, which I keep going back and forth on. Some moments I think it’s exactly the right length. Other moments I want one more song between “To Feel No Way” and “The Road to Death.” Something that bridges the personal solitude of the first half to the public mortality of the second. Maybe that song exists somewhere on Rostam’s hard drive. Maybe it’ll show up on a deluxe edition. Or maybe its absence is yet another rub.

But I keep returning to “Hardy,” and the line that I think is the album’s whole project in fourteen words. “Maybe the greatest art is never completed. We only have to leave it knowing we tried.” Rostam has tried, harder than many will want to admit. He’s made the rare album that gets quiet as the world gets louder, and that bets on its audience to meet it halfway.

American Stories is available now.

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Images courtesy of Matsor Projects.