Beirut

Someday in the distant future, cultural archaeologists will isolate a huge square block in Brooklyn’s formerly industrial neighborhood of Greenpoint and decide here was the incubator of indie cool. “TV on the Radio used to practice down there,” Zach Condon says, gesturing north as we cross the street toward the Pencil Factory, a refurbished pub opposite his band’s rehearsal studio—a raw, empty space in a 1931 Art Deco warehouse where Eberhard Faber once manufactured those canary-yellow No. 2 pencils that have been a part of every American childhood. More recently, bands like Blonde Redhead and Condon’s own Beirut have replaced the Italian and Polish immigrant laborers of yore, knocking together bits and pieces of songs over long, sweaty days like this one. “I used to see Kyp every day,” he adds, mentioning TVOTR’s lead guitarist, owner of an unmistakable Afro. “But I don’t think he ever recognized me. He never said ‘Hi.’”

You might not recognize him, either. Condon—reed-thin and barely old enough to buy his own beer—could be any of the thousands of kids flocking about the ’hood on a lazy summer Sunday afternoon, the kind of afternoon The Kinks used to sing about. There’s a free concert (Blonde Redhead, naturally) at nearby McCarren Park Pool, and every budding hipster within reach of the L Train is pouring in. Though he may have been last year’s most-talked-about performer in the amorphous and fickle online universe of MP3 blogs, Condon could easily evaporate into the crowd. Sleepy eyes and a faint blanket of fuzz under his jawline offsets a baby face almost as pale as his plain-white T-shirt. His hair is wavy and tousled and, when he turns up his palms, you can glimpse a tattoo of a French hunting horn below each wrist. Yet, as easily as the kid blends into the picture, Condon—who’s been traveling the world since he dropped out of his Santa Fe high school at 16—feels like a total stranger, as out of place in the New World as one of those freshly arrived Poles, churning out pencils in the post-war 1940s.

“It’s been hard coming back to New York,” says the composer, who is open and outgoing despite his frazzled mood. He needed a getaway after the whirlwind experience of the past 18 months and the starmaking sensation, 2006’s Gulag Orkestar, a batch of home-recorded, Balkans-saturated songs he spent years conjuring, and released under the nom-de-rock Beirut. Condon—who sings in a sweet, soothing baritone and accompanies himself on a battery of instruments (trumpet, accordion, ukulele, etc.) with which he has a non-virtuosic acquaintance—had escaped to where he always escapes: Paris, the city whose polyglot musical culture most closely resembles his own aesthetic. The 20th Arrondissement, which Condon called home, boasts two of the loveliest neighborhoods in the City of Light—Menilmontant and Belleville—as well as the fabled Pere Lachaise cemetery, the eternal mailing address for Oscar Wilde and Jim Morrison. Perhaps most significantly, Chez Condon was happily adjacent to a club where his beloved gypsy brass bands held forth. “Paris has been around since the dawn of cities. They’ve figured out what it means to live in an urban center and live your life without all these things that suck. In New York, you pick an apartment and it seems perfect. Then you realize you’re too far from the subway, there’s no air-conditioning, the toilet doesn’t work, the fridge is blown out, there’s cockroaches everywhere, and there’s no light! You tough it out, though. It’s part of the game you play here. But in Paris it seems like it’s all figured out.”

Given Condon’s natural tendency toward chaos, a little bit of a sure thing offers necessary grounding. As he fires up a smoke from a blue pack of American Spirits at the sidewalk table we’re sharing, he apologizes for any discombobulation. He’s floating through limbo right now, having finished a new album—the sweepingly melancholy Flying Club Cup—stuffed with arrangements for the umpteen instruments for which he’s compelled to compose, yet with no clue how an actual band will translate this complex, aching, resplendent stuff to the stage. Some songs feature as many as 14 instruments, way more musicians than Condon can afford to take on the road, even if that egalitarian Decemberists/Arcade Fire omni-band thing continues catching on. I make a joke about hiring a mariachi outfit instead, and Condon raises his eyebrows. “It’s funny you say that. I thought about getting a really good mariachi band from New Mexico, and get me in a suit just singing the songs.”

Much of the The Flying Club Cup was pieced together over three months at a downtown dance studio in Albuquerque, and in spots as unlikely as a public restroom in the Chicago airport—or so Condon claims, perhaps as an exaggeration to illustrate how hard it was to snag all the various musicians sailing in and out of his orbit. “It was a nightmare,” he says. The process concluded with a four-day mixing marathon in Chicago, highlighted by a contagion of stomach flu. “It wasn’t so much battling an inability to write a melody. It was struggling with people’s schedules. As soon as they got there it was immediate, working under pressure, working them like dogs.”