Photo by Kirstie Shanley

The story's been told time and again that Vampire Weekend were once just four guys bouncing around Columbia University making music before they hit it big. While at Columbia, frontman Ezra Koenig was an English and Creative Writing major and contributed to on-campus publications.

A 2006 edition of Quarto, the undergraduate literary magazine of the university's creative writing department, was recently unearthed. In it, you can find a five-paragraph short story called "Off the Grid" by Koenig, then a college senior. It deals with themes familiar to any Vampire Weekend fan: love, New York, finding your place in the world. Also, his contributor's bio is as prescient as prescient gets:

Ezra Koenig is a senior English and Creative Writing major. He enjoys writing short prose pieces and pop songs, especially about post-hippie domesticity and the tenuous connection between preppiness and colonialism.

Read the whole story below and the rest of Quarto Volume 58 in the magazine's archives.

Revisit our 2013 interview with Vampire Weekend.

Watch Vampire Weekend on Pitchfork.tv's "Over/Under":