Photo by Monika Mogi

Vampire Weekend’s long-awaited Father of the Bride LP arrived on May 3, but from the first few notes of single “Harmony Hall,” which dropped in January, many music fans could pick up on a certain jammy, free-spirited essence seeping into the band’s sound.

Now that the entire album has arrived, frontman Ezra Koenig has started discussing specific inspirations for Father of the Bride, specifically the Wetlands, which acted as an epicenter for the live music community in the ’90s, before shutting its doors in September 2001.

“People reference the Grateful Dead or Phish in terms of this album, and I like the Grateful Dead and Phish, so I’m not trying to distance myself from it,” he recently told Pitchfork. “But when I really think about a true moodboard reference, it wouldn’t quite be one of those bands. It was more like a feeling, like a memory from my youth of a place like Wetlands, which presented crunchy stuff, punk/hardcore, and hip-hop all under the umbrella of environmental justice. When it first opened, it was kind of like a community hub for environmental and social justice as well as a venue. I only got to go there once or twice—I know I saw Karl Denson and the Greyboy Allstars there—but it reminded me of a type of eclectic East Coast culture and of older kids I knew in my town, kids I met at summer camp. It just made me think about the type of person who’d go see Blues Traveler and Spin Doctors.”

Interestingly, Koenig name-dropped the Greyboy Allstars almost a decade prior in the February/March 2010 issue of Relix. Discussing his roots, he mentioned that he even covered the Greyboy Allstars in his early days as a high-school musician.

“One thing my parents ingrained in me is that it is up to you how much you want to know about the world,” he said noting how he listened to everything from classic rock and Afro-beat to rap, while still finding time to play in a funk band that covered the Greyboy Allstars. “In the era of the Internet, you don’t always need to travel to learn about other music. We listened to all sorts of music our whole lives. I found that a lot of big cities across the first world have quite a bit in common.”