Rostam’s ‘American Stories’: A quick chat backstage at the Ford

Rostam brought his lovely and inquisitive new album, “American Stories,” to the Ford in Los Angeles on Saturday night. After the show — during which Fleet Foxes’ Robin Pecknold joined Rostam to sing Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” — I caught up with the musician and former Vampire Weekend member for a chat about some of his LP’s themes and inspirations (and also Coldplay).

One of my favorite songs on this new record is “Back of a Truck.” Your last album had —
“From the Back of a Cab,” yes.

Also “4Runner.” And your first record had “Bike Dream.” My man loves a song about a vehicle.
I’m transportationally minded.

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Why?
You know, when I was a kid, I used to love racing games: Crazy Taxi, F-Zero for SNES. I like experiencing time as life passes before your eyes on a bike, on a train, in a cab, driving, a road trip. I think I’m someone who loves a journey.

What was your first car?
A Mercedes-Benz station wagon that was about 11 years old when I got my hands on it. One incredible thing about it, which was very useful in high school, was that the way-back had two seats that flipped, so you could travel with seven comfortably. It was fun to do carpools with that car.

Your previous album, “Changephobia,” was built, to my ears, around the saxophone.
True.

This record seems built around pedal steel and the saz. Are you a guy who likes to build a record around one sound?
Sometimes I go in with a vision of one idea being a part of every song. One idea I had for this record, even before I had the word “stories” in the title, was that every song would be a story song. The final product is not that — there are stories that I tell on the record, but every song is not a story song. Another idea was that there had to be Persian music on every song. Ultimately, I’m happy with how the final product came out, where I wasn’t so devoted to any one sound. I like making albums that are diverse — I don’t think I ever want to make a strict concept album.

The album closes with “The Weight,” which is set on a college campus. You graduated from Columbia almost exactly 20 years ago in May 2006. John McCain was a commencement speaker, and he defended the Iraq war.
I remember this now — it’s all coming back to me, in the words of Celine Dion.

Now you’ve got a record to some degree about your Iranian heritage in the midst of a war with Iran.
That’s reductive — the cookie doesn’t crumble quite so.

Speak on it.
I love the gift that I get to receive in writing songs, where I get to say everything I want to say and how I want to say it in the song. I’m never gonna give you the legend — I’m never gonna give you the key to the buried treasure. I made choices when I wrote these lyrics, and I did it with thought and care. I don’t want the song to only have one meaning. I’d like to write other things — a memoir, short stories, a novel one day maybe. And in those cases, you don’t get the same gift.

The gift of songwriting is ambiguity?
You get to choose your words, and then you never have to say exactly what you were thinking.

Nevertheless, the first verse of “The Weight” talks about a commencement on a rainy day. If my internet research is correct, it was raining on your 2006 graduation.
It was drizzling. I remember going out to lunch with my parents and a friend and his parents, and it wasn’t raining so hard that we couldn’t have lunch. But, see, this is why —

You get a little tetchy when it comes to laying out the meanings.
Having written songs since about 2006, I think about what the song will be like or how it will be heard 20 years from now. I just want it to live in this open space.

Let me hit you with an influence that I picked up on this record: Coldplay’s “Viva La Vida.”
[Silence]

The album, not the song.
Rick Rubin once said to me — he has a theory about album track lists where he thinks that the first four songs are totally crucial. He’ll say, “When have you ever loved an album that you didn’t love the first four songs?”

An insane answer to my question.
“Viva La Vida” is an album that I love, and I don’t love the first four songs.

You’ve lived for the last stretch in L.A., but you’ve more recently been spending time in New York. Is “American Stories” a product of Los Angeles or of New York City?
I was kind of finishing the record while I was splitting time between New York and L.A., but I had pretty much written most of it here. But one of the songs, “Hardy,” I remember that started in 2012 in the last apartment that I lived in in New York before I left for L.A.

Is L.A. or New York a better music town? You have to choose — there’s no squirreling out of it.
I’m setting up a studio space in New York, so let me answer you after that’s up and running.

You kind of squirreled out of it.
I’m waiting on the piano — it’s coming from England.

Rostam in Los Angeles in 2021.

(Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)

Your mom is a well-known scholar of Persian food. What’s the best thing you can cook?
Tahdig, which is a special way of making rice where you get the bottom of the pot to create a crust.

The first photo that comes up on Google when somebody searches up Rostam —
I don’t want to know, but sure.

It’s a portrait from an L.A. Times profile that I wrote in 2021. You’re wearing a Metallica “And Justice for All” T-shirt. If you knew then what you know now — that that would be the picture that people find of you — do you stand by Metallica “And Justice for All”?
I think the things that I love about Metallica are probably not necessarily what everyone loves about Metallica. There’s a certain loftiness, I think, to Metallica.

You get deep into the philosophy of Metallica.
I get deep into the philosophy of a lot of things in music. I think it’s part of the fun.