Minds meet at the merch table

​If ever the was a home team crowd for Vampire Weekend's Ezra Koenig, far away from the slings and arrows of preppiness and the dark continent and the looming specter of book-learning, it was here, at the New York Public Library, where your bio can proudly boast that your second album, Contra, "includes no songs about commas." Seating Koenig opposite a novelist, John Wray (as opposed to say, a bitter, failed writer turned music critic), was an obvious and overdue set-up waiting to happen. So leave it to the NYPL's Young Lions--library supermembers in their 20s and 30s who, in exchange for a tax-deductable 350 bucks, get their own private events like this one--to finally make it happen, gathering the city's youthful book nerds for an evening devoted to "Music & Words."

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