One is just fond memories of the Steve Martin film, which I was a kid when that came out and then I didn’t see the Spencer Tracy one until later in life. But I guess for me, I can’t remember exactly if one of the movies was on TV or I saw something about a wedding - I saw the phrase ‘father of the bride’ somewhere and I just started thinking about it. And I was like on one level, you know, it’s the name of a comedy, it’s fun, it’s almost lightweight in a way - ‘Father of the Bride’! - it just makes it seem like a fun wedding or something.



And then the more I thought about it, I started to almost feel like there’s some biblical undertones to ‘father of the bride’, like in the Old and New Testament there’s so much wedding imagery, and so many of the metaphors of religion are about marriage - the bride of Christ or God and the children of Israel. There’s so much talk about marriages and metaphor. And i’m not married, I’ve never been married, but I do have a family, and I’ve been in plenty of relationships like anybody, and I’ve had lots of human relationships - and I just started to think about ‘father of the bride’ and that biblical idea of marriage not as this like, a literal thing, but just as this very flexible metaphor for just the relationships we have and the things we owe each other and how we relate to each other, so there was something that I started to like about that.



Maybe also this is the first album I made in my 30s and wanting to–you know, I think when people hear the whole album they’ll see there’s some songs where I write more straightforwardly about interpersonal stuff in a way that maybe when I was young I always wanted to put a twist on. And now I’m kinda more excited about some fairly straightforward ideas.



So anyway, I liked ‘father of the bride’ as just thinking about wedding imagery,but not literally a wedding, but just as this big metaphor, and then I thought more about ‘father of the bride’, and when you think about Steve Martin it’s fun - it’s kind of like this bumbling comedic dude. And then I thought more about ‘father of the bride’ as just like in the metaphoric sense like this almost scary figure. It’s the past looming in the background, it’s a moment of transition. These are the things when I started to feel like there’s like a richness to this phrase, and I always like coming up with the title early in the process. ‘Cause we had this working title, Mitsubishi Macchiato, that was helpful at first, but then when I started thinking about ‘father of the bride’–you know and I think all this stuff will make more sense when they hear the whole album, but I always think with Vampire Weekend, I always like phrases and words where there’s a very heady, pretentious flavor on one side, and then on the other side, there’s just like borderline stupidity. Like I could talk about the Bible and psychology and all these things, but then I also like the idea of just picturing somebody just being stoned watching TV - [stoned voice] “Oh, Father of the Bride” - I like when there’s a little bit of both.

“ — Ezra Koenig talks about how he came up with their fourth album title, Father of the Bride (via NPR)