Skip to content
Premieres

See Steve Buscemi Give Vampire Weekend Sage Advice in ‘Unstaged’ Clip

Vampire Weekend Steve Buscemi Meets Band Video

Confusion reigned when video emerged of Steve Buscemi singing with Vampire Weekend on the streets of New York on Easter weekend. But then we learned that the Boardwalk Empire star is directing a live webcast of the band’s April 28 Roseland Ballroom concert for American Express’ Unstaged series, and it all sort of made sense. Then there was that funny clip of the actor referring to them as “Vampire Holiday,” and now we’ve got “Steve Buscemi Meets the Band” — the awkward icing on the awesome cake.

In the video’s opening moments, we learn a possibly specious (hopefully not) fact: that bassist Chris Baio discovered “his maternal great grandmother was first cousins with the paternal great aunt” of Buscemi. The clip supposedly captures the first meeting between the two famous entities, and ol’ Nucky Thompson has no problem fitting right in with the boys. He calls Rostam Batmanglij “Rasta,” offers to promote the band from his AOL email address, and gets in on their rehearsal of “Unbelievers.” He also comes up with some pretty good career advice — namely that they work on writing lyrics that people can understand. “Sometimes I think I know what they mean and I’m listening and then you go, ‘Peter Gabriel too,’ or, ‘Louis Vuitton,’ like out of nowhere and I’m lost.” Yuck it up with Nuck and Ez-what above.