Vampire Weekend Releases New Song About Disgraced Art Dealer Mary Boone

Mary Boone, the famed New York dealer who went to prison for tax fraud, is the subject of a new song by Vampire Weekend that shares its name with hers.

But the song is less an ode to her eponymous gallery, which boosted the profiles of artists ranging from Barbara Kruger to Ai Weiwei, than it is an elegy for a bygone era in New York. The single, newly released this Thursday, only abstractly refers to Boone’s business and the subsequent scandal surrounding her personal finances, using her name mainly as part of a rhyme scheme.

“Mary Boone, Mary Boone,” Vampire Weekend frontman Ezra Koenig can be heard cooing at various points. “I’m on the dark side of your moon. Mary Boone, Mary Boone, well, I hope you feel like loving someone soon.”

Boone launched her gallery in 1977, and would in the coming years rise to the status of one of the foremost dealers in the booming SoHo art scene. She went on to give key shows to Julian Schnabel, Eric Fischl, Ross Bleckner, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and many more before the gallery closed in 2019.

That year, Boone’s reputation was forever changed when she was convicted of tax evasion. She had pled guilty the year before to owing $3 million in taxes between 2009 and 2011. A court sentenced her to 30 months in prison, though she only ended up serving 13 because she was released early in 2020 amid a spike in Covid cases among inmates.

“Mary Boone,” the Vampire Weekend song, appears on Only God Was Above Us, the beloved rock band’s new album and its first since 2019. The songs released thus far from the LP refer to generational shifts that seem more broadly rooted in Manhattan’s past. The album’s cover is a 1988 Steven Siegel photograph of a turned-over, graffiti-covered New York City subway car with people fooling around in it.

“Weird, half-baked memories and pictures and thoughts and family history. That’s the version of New York that’s floating through this record,” Koenig told the New York Times in a profile of the record earlier this month.