Both of these songs made their way to my ears at a time when I was doing a lot of back porch sitting. It was in those post-college days of coffee shop clothing, night owl living, wanderlust, and fevered reading that I thought I was getting to something essential about living. Both of these songs are studies of emotions rooted in solitude. What makes them interesting is that they both use wordless choruses to capture something ineffable. Spoken words are not a feature of being alone.

These choruses are not fluff, but sounds encoded with meaning, meaning that is better expressed without language. The first song uses melancholic descending wails, the second ascending exuberant bursts.

“The Party” is all remorse and lust. As the narrator leaves a party without a clean conscience or money for cab fare, she walks out into darkness. “Keeping my eye on the exit sign,” she instructs herself, “steady now…” before letting out a somber wail of alienation like a coyote’s croon.

The Vampire Weekend song courses quickly with anticipation as the singer recounts a friend’s walk through NYC, and the wait in line for the Museum of Modern Art gallery. When the moment comes (“you waited since lunch, it all comes at once…”), the singer bursts into an indulgent, delightful cry that sort of spirals upwards, seeming to climb the walls of some brightly lit cathedral to the heavens. It’s the perfect way to express the eureka! moment of seeing something beautiful in a museum. it’s a joyful dizziness and a humbling diminishment of the individual at the altar of beauty, all stitched together in a shriek of a hook.

These songs certainly capture a dynamic in my own life. I love the quietness and the coldness, the smallness that I feel as I weave through neighborhoods with my dog after midnight on a meditative walk. And I love the same sort of smallness, but a more triumphant one, that I feel when I approach profundity in a museum, or in nature.

These modern musicians are aware of the trouble with words, and they are so deft with melody-writing that they can skip the corny rhymes and cleverness and just wail. Brilliant, woeful, joyful wails that burst out lovely and expressive. If I were ever to enjoy opera, this is the path. It makes me wonder about language.