No. 039 - Vampire Weekend’s “Hannah Hunt” changed my life
Lyrics as literature and Jonathan Rooke's decade-long friendship ritual
🏆 A top-read essay
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 by Grace Lilly, supported by readers.
• 4 min read •
I’ve always been a words person, the earthiest Capricorn who has ever stuck to a routine out of a sense of responsibility and stability, and a bit of an emotionless rock who relies on analytical logic to figure out how I feel.
Naturally, I found my calling in college as a pretentious English major.
My hours in the Fordham University library spent poring over every quote I had annotated while reading novels, poems, epics, and the odd chanson de geste until the web of authorial craft, subconscious connection, and thematic relevance became clear were some of the most fulfilling times of my life. I reveled in decoding Jacques Lacan’s impenetrable theory of language and the unconscious, trying to understand how links of metaphor and metonymy could both create truth while obscuring some spiritual reality.
The closest I’ve ever felt to God was a week of class when a lecture on the manipulation of the audience in Puck’s closing Midsummer Night’s Dream monologue had me feeling the fourth wall of Lacan’s signifying chain present like Snout’s wall — as if it had a crannied hole or chink allowing the spirit to pass through. I once wrote a paper arguing that A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is not just written by James Joyce but is literally James Joyce.
And yeah, I talked about this shit at parties.
So, of course, one of my favorite bands is Vampire Weekend, a group whose chief songwriter, Ezra Koenig, smatters dense wordplay, allusion, and symbolism across the worldly soundscapes crafted by the group as he contemplates all that is worth contemplating. And one of my favorite songs — a song that changed my life — is the centerpiece of Modern Vampires of the City: “Hannah Hunt.”
Telling the story of a relationship on a road trip, the relatively sparse lyrics are full of symbols rife for interpretation. The verses are full of wisdom from gardeners and holy men, a narrator who denies all he is told, plants that move and cry, and a fire fed by the shreds of a newspaper.
The English major has to read these episodes against those of great literary journeys.
Dante follows Virgil in search of divine beauty, but Hannah is traveling away from Providence. Odysseus seeks to return home, but our narrator surely must be seeking rebirth when he gets to Phoenix. Just as the Divine Comedy and The Odyssey interrogate the cultures in which they were written, the chorus of “Hannah Hunt” forces us to consider what it means to be freed from linear time through the power of love only to still be shackled to the US dollar.
For a while, the song is deceptively simple musically. Background sounds of rock instrumentation, studio magic, and some whispered harmonies from Rostam Batmanglij all serve to put Koenig’s words and voice front and center. The lyrics unfold and layer upon themselves, asking the listener to make meaning of them. Until they stop.
At the two minute and forty-three second mark of the song, “Hannah Hunt” explodes.
What was simple backing music flings itself to the front, rushing towards the listener with arms outstretched as if greeting you at the airport after years of separation. Koenig repeats the chorus, this time as a shriek to get his voice to carry above the music. It’s not about the words any more though, it’s about the shriek and the coming embrace not mentioned by name.
For me, that embrace is the kind you receive from someone who wants you to stop talking. Maybe it's because some confession of love is being ruined by words, or a panicky rant needs to be cut short before the spiral gains momentum, or a well-intentioned apology is only making things worse. It’s a reminder that words can get in the way.
As Lacan said, “the letter killeth while the spirit giveth life.”
Starting sometime in college, my friends started playing “Hannah Hunt” three times at the end of every party we hosted. It was effective; by the third playthrough, the only people still present were the inner circle, all lying on the floor, finding each other lost in whatever it was we wanted to be lost in, without the need to say anything.
Even though I’m on the other side of thirty now, we still end parties that way.
I’m still lying on the floor with my friends, though “friends” is a laughably small word for what we are.
This piece is really about those people, the ones who inspire me to act instead of talk, to break routine and responsibility to do what feels right for me and them, for the people who squeeze water from the big dumb rock of my heart. The people who play “Hannah Hunt” three times in a row with me — a song that changed my life. ◆
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About Jonathan
Jonathan Rooke is a New York City public school teacher (and thinks you probably should be too), a Dungeon Master, and girls track coach. He’s not really sure how that happened, but it’s a pretty good mix.
Instagram @sirjrooke_money
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