Rostam Batmanglij has always identified himself as a record producer. “[It’s] my entry point into making music—how I look at making music,” he said. “It’s my language.” His love of production work is the reason. More than a dozen years into his music career, he continues to keep instruments, microphones, and any recording equipment on hand in his home, ready to produce at a moment’s notice: “It’s kind of my philosophy to put everything in one room and make it as easy as possible to record as soon as you have an idea.”

For a long time Batmanglij was a producer and. Aside from being credited on a few tracks alongside Charli XCX and Carly Rae Jepsen, he was a producer and multi-instrumentalist with Vampire Weekend from 2006 to 2016, working on the group’s first three albums. On his respective albums with Ra Ra Riot’s Wes Miles as Discovery and the Walkmen’s Hamilton Leithauser, he was a producer and a cowriter and collaborator. With his debut album, Half-Light, he was a producer and a solo artist. “My name was somehow attached to the project in every one of those six albums,” said Batmanglij.

The year 2019 has been different. He worked on a single song, “We Belong Together,” but Vampire Weekend’s Father of the Bride is largely the band’s first album without him. It’s also been the year, however, that Batmanglij has further embraced his singular identity as a producer and subsumed himself in other people’s work. Take Clairo’s debut album, Immunity, on which Batmanglij said he is a producer on every song…and that’s it. “It really felt right with this project,” Batmanglij said. “And it made me realize that that is a role I really love doing and I want to continue to do, which is to really help artists craft a full-length—a collection of songs that works together—and for my role to be the producer, and to bring out the most in the artist.”

He was also part of the production team for Haim’s forthcoming third album, which features the single “Summer Girl.” Batmanglij looked back at that song and his other producing work this year,

providing some behind-the-scenes commentary on his collaborations as well as the relationships he’s managed to cultivate and maintain through a shared love of music.

“Fallingwater” by Maggie Rogers, Heard It in a Past Life

So Maggie, just by coincidence, has the same management as Hamilton Leithauser. And I’d been working with him—we had just put out a record we made together, [I Had a Dream That You Were Mine]. And so we were doing a show where we played the record live for the first time ever. And somehow either Maggie had asked or maybe her management had thought it might be a good idea for her to sing the song “1959” with us, a track that featured Angel Deradoorian on the record. That was the first time I met Maggie, but I was aware of her because of “Alaska.” I remember being at a party and someone said, “Have you heard this song? It’s kind of like EDM with nature sounds.” And when I heard that description, it sounded like the worst song in the world. There’s no way this song could possibly be good. But of course, it turns out, it’s an amazing song. And I contributed to one of the many millions of people who streamed that song the weekend that it came out. And so she was on my radar and I really liked what she was doing. So she and I stayed in touch. She sent me her E.P. And I told her, “I really love this. If you’re in Los Angeles, we should get together and maybe we could write something.” We started working on “Fallingwater” the first day that we ever got in the studio. She had the foundation of the song. She had the melody and lyrics over different chords, and when she came to the studio, she was singing them and I just started playing the piano, and playing the chords that are now in the song. She started singing over the chords I played, and the two things really fit together in this new way. And I think she was singing higher than she ever sang, maybe, and she wasn’t totally comfortable. And I was just like, “Let’s record it, and we can always make it lower if we need to.” But that was kind of the beginning of “Fallingwater.”