No. 076 - Vampire Weekend’s “White Sky” changed my life

How cheeseburger Fridays helped Sean Swaby cope with an untimely cross-country move

Feb 07, 2025

This Song Changed My Life is an independent music publication featuring essays from people all around the world about the songs that mean the most to them. Created (and illustrated) by Grace Lilly.

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• 4 min read •

Can a whimsical happy-go-lucky song about staring at buildings change one's life?

WELL.

Let's rewind to early 2020, the most fucked of timelines.

I'm a Californian through and through. Grew up: Sacramento. College: Santa Barbara. Found a professional life and community in the floating city on the Bay: San Francisco, with its dewy, eucalyptus-filled parks, candy-colored Victorians, and fog drenched 2 a.m. walks home.

I flirted with a move to London, but honestly, I never saw myself leaving California. And especially not for New York City.

So when my company held a financial gun to my head and told me to move to New York or no longer receive a paycheck...

I landed at JFK with four bags aka my entire life.

I grabbed the keys to my first-ever apartment without roommates. Bought a bedside table, black-out curtains, a utilitarian kitchen table. I convinced a cabbie to drive me and my L-shaped couch 30 minutes through Brooklyn. Me, pinned underneath, holding the gray leather upholstery tight, so a bump didn’t jettison the whole damn thing. A friend and I hauled that couch up four stories, and when I settled in that night, feet up on the L, I thought… just the first wild New York story of what will surely be many.

This was February 2020. Yeah, yeah, nailed the timing.

It's a bizarre feeling to live in a new city, especially New York fucking City, without being allowed to actually *live* in it. Sirens passed all day and night. I live in a building with four floors of units; I saw no one. Maybe a face across the street, looking out, but never getting out. The friend who helped haul up the couch moved where his family could have more space.

So how does an unheralded 2010 Vampire Weekend song come into play here during a global plague?

Everyone developed Covid habits to stay sane. Zoom poker. Zoom beers. Family crossword puzzles. Eventually masked outdoor hangs. Screens between me and everything else — family, friends, the city itself.

With one exception: cheeseburger Friday. Every Friday, I took a patty from the freezer, threw it on the cast iron with some onions, cracked a beer (or three) and listened to Vampire Weekend. Constant as gravity.

But Vampire Weekend's involvement is the head-scratcher. I always liked them, they're easy, they're fun, they make me smile. But part of *my* everyday life…?

In times when I had no desire to live in the five boroughs, I always thought of them as *the* band of New York. And as I listened to poppy songs about Columbia University and life on the Upper West Side, even as a new Brooklyn resident, there was always something reassuring about Ezra Koenig's Manhattan curiosity:

A little stairway,
a little piece of carpet
A pair of mirrors that are facing one another
Out in both directions, a thousand little Julias
That come together
in the middle of Manhattan

Trapped in New York but desperate to actually live there, I hung on these words, fascinated, hoping to someday experience freely living in the self-proclaimed “best city in the world.” It helped me feel like I really was living in this big, magical place, even when I was confined to a tiny studio apartment in Crown Heights wondering, imagining, what an unmasked, un-socially distanced NYC experience would be like.

Sit on the park wall, ask all the right questions
“Why are the horses racing taxis in the winter?”
Look up at the buildings, imagine who might live there
Imagining your Wolfords in a ball upon the sink there

View of the Brooklyn Bridge and Manhattan

The words of admiration for landmarks across Manhattan were reassuring to the point that, through this miserable time, there was a shining light at the end of the tunnel. The city visuals felt so specific I wanted to ditch my mask, get the hell off Zoom, and grab them. Those three minutes unshackled lockdown claustrophobia and reminded me that all would be okay in this wildly unexpected move to a city I never craved to live in.

It seems hyperbolic to say that the simplicity of a feel-good song changed a life. But for me, in such abnormal and unprecedented times, survival equated to a life-changing experience.

“White Sky” fed me optimism in a time of extreme personal doubt.

Years later, with memories of new 2 a.m. walks home, Victorians replaced by brownstones, fog replaced by actual seasons, I look up at the buildings thankful for every new piece of carpet and wall conversation.

And, crucially, for no longer having to just imagine. ◆

About Sean

Sean Swaby is a social-media manager for Bleacher Report’s football/soccer/futbol brand. His annual New Year’s resolution is to make sure his Spotify wrapped isn’t the same-ish artists as the previous year and fails at it every time.

Instagram @seanswaby

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Shane Evans (No. 023)

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