Vampire Weekend Debut Twiddle’s “Jamflowman” in Vermont

Photo credit: Bill Kelly

While they’ve long danced along the line, it seems safe to say that in 2025, Vampire Weekend are a bona fide jamband. The trio’s sound and approach certainly push against the genre’s definitional limits, but when a band has covered the Grateful Dead at Coachella, in a SiriusXM album debut set and onstage at the MusiCares’ Persons of the Year gala, stretched “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa” to a half-hour with Goose and toured with Mike Gordon (not to mention drummer Chris Tomson’s part in the Taper’s Choice Relix 50 celebration), all in a single year, it’s splitting hairs to find a better term.

It should come as little surprise, then, that the three-decade indie icons’ performance at Essex Junction, Vt.’s Champlain County Fairgrounds last night featured some serious scene appreciation. After an opening set from Geese and a performance that deftly wove Only God Was Above Us standouts like “Classical,” “Capricorn” and “Gen-X Cops” with longtime favorites like “Holiday,” “Diane Young,” “A-Punk” and “Stranger,” extended with a brief excursion into “Birdland,” the band’s encore was undisputably jammy. Beyond the Dead’s “Fire on the Mountain,” which the group first staged last September, the requests and covers portion of the evening cut deeper with a debut of Twiddle’s 2017 anthem “Jamflowman.”

VW’s first foray into the third-gen jamband world was likely spurred by the show’s location in the Green Mountain State, where the now on-hiatus Twiddle formed in 2004, and just outside the jam mecca of Burlington, Vt. But the cover’s roots go back at least as far as 2019, when frontman Ezra Koenig discussed “Jamflowman” at length on his Time Crisis radio show with co-host Jake Longstreth. Koenig expressed that the track gets some grief from some of the “mean-spirited people in the jam community” for its lighthearted tone, suggesting that purists feel “their fandom and obsession with the various Jamflowmen that they admire is somehow more sophisticated.” He prodded, “What if I told you the Jamflowman was Mr. Jerry Garcia or Trey Anastasio?”

Twiddle’s connection to Vampire Weekend would have been formalized in 2020, when the band was unveiled as a special guest on the Father of the Bride Tour, if plans hadn’t been derailed by the global pandemic. Oh well–we can only hope for a Twiddle reunion for a chance to see Koenig, Tomson and Chris Baio get “Lost in the Cold” or Mihali and company cross the “Campus.”

Until then, Vampire Weekend’s Only God Was Above Us Tour Part 2 will continue tomorrow in Portland, Maine, then bring on 20 further shows through Sept. 27. For tickets and more information, visit vampireweekend.com.