Front Row for Vampire Weekend’s Surprise Time Again Gig

Keonig tunes his guitar. “What’s up Time Again!” he yells over the racket of a passing fire truck. You can understand why the band wanted to shake things up before the Garden. Vampire Weekend played their first gigs nearly two decades ago, and lately they’ve been trying to make the experience of playing seminal hit “A-Punk” feel “fun and fresh every night,” as Koenig puts it. “I think this is definitely our best tour,” he adds. They’ve been deconstructing and reconstructing the VW concert for a few tours now, and the current setlist is the most experimental, laced with surprise jam-band romps like “Cocaine Cowboys,” a twangy barnstormer which combines VW song “Married in a Gold Rush” with tunes from the Gatlin Brothers Band, the Flying Burrito Brothers, the Grateful Dead, and Phish. Each night closes with audience requests; on Wednesday in Charlottesville, they attempted to cover “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” “Can You Feel the Love Tonight,” “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea,” “Funkytown,” “Fire on the Mountain,” “Here Comes the Sun,” and “La Vie en Rose.”

The band politely waves off certain suggestions. “We have a lot of younger people requesting Chappell Roan and Playboi Carti,” Koenig tells me. “And it’s like, 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.”

At Time Again, everyone just wants to hear the hits, and with no setlist the four-piece happily obliges, blazing through “A-Punk” and “Oxford Comma” as Citi Bikers park on the corner and locals on their way home from work crane their necks for a view. “We didn’t really invite anyone,” Despot tells me—until a few hours ago, when he got worried that nobody would show up and sent around some texts, summoning members of the VW extended universe like Dev Hynes, Aaron Maine of Porches, comedian Brandon Wardell, and local indie band Rebounder.

The view from the nosebleeds