Ezra Koenig and Justin Vernon Talk High School, Pressures of Tour and More on Time Crisis
Photos via Kevin Winter/Getty, JSN Photography/WireImage, Beats 1
In a remarkable meeting of the indie minds, Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon sat down with Vampire Weekend frontman Ezra Koenig on his Beats 1 show, Time Crisis. Koenig’s show, which began in 2015, has featured a variety of other heavyweights—Florence Welch of Florence + The Machine, Azealia Banks, Dave Longstreth of Dirty Projectors, Ed Droste of Grizzly Bear, Dev Hynes of Blood Orange, and T-Pain, among others—but he says this episode “feels like we’re a real show now, [with] a real guest” joining him in the studio.
Koenig’s and Vernon’s projects rose through the ranks along a similar timeline, but the two aren’t quite sure when or how many times they’ve met each other before. They share the “weird, kind of dark” experience of their first and possibly only previous meeting at a “brutal” Minneapolis sports bar, Sneaky Pete’s, after a sold-out Vampire Weekend show: “There’s a chance we never met,” jokes Vernon. “That’s how sneaky Pete is.”