What Rostam Batmanglij Can’t Live Without

I like this toothpaste because I feel like it has this magical power, which is that if I wake up early and want to get a few more hours of sleep, I can brush my teeth with this and then go back to sleep. And, actually, somehow it helps me fall back asleep. It’s also one of the fewtoothpastesthat doesn’t have a chemical called SLS, which is sodium lauryl sulfate, that can irritate your mouth. Some people are more sensitive to it than others. I’ve tried a lot of different toothpastes, and I kind of need this one now. I can’t mess with other ones. They make my mouth feel weird.

I also think it’s good for singing. It reduces acid reflux. The tragedy for singers is that all singing generates a little bit of acid reflux. So you have to do certain things to maintain a low acidity, and baking soda is very basic. It changes the pH in your mouth in a positive way. It’s something that is less of an issue in your 20s. And then in your 30s, everything doesn’t work as well as it used to.

I participate in a semi-bicoastal lifestyle. When I go to New York, I like to take the red-eye and sleep during the flight. In some ways, I’m cursed, like with acid reflux, but in some ways, I’m blessed. One thing is that I can fall asleep before the plane takes off and wake up as it’s landing. I read somewhere that one should never eat on planes. Eating on a plane is like a one-way ticket to jet lag, because eating tricks your body into thinking that it should keep running the clock — butnoteating creates a pause.

The way that this connects back to the red-eye is you get on the red-eye, you fall asleep, you don’t eat anything on the plane. You wake up, drink some water, and you’re in New York. And, hopefully, if you time it right, there’s not too much traffic getting into the city in the early morning. Then you get your whole day in New York. Maybe you get to sleep for a few extra hours. You use the toothpaste and that helps you fall back asleep for a few more hours. Once you’re in New York, you wake up at noon. And all my New York friends seem to wake up at noon anyway, so you’re right on schedule.

I like to use these Bose QC 35 noise-canceling headphones. They’re not the latest and greatest. They’re not at the technological forefront per se, but I do find them to be the most comfortable and usable noise-canceling headphones. TheApple versionthat goes over your ear, they weigh like 40 pounds. It’s pretty insane. Not actually 40 pounds, but it feels like 40 pounds. It feels like you’re giving your neck a workout when you wear those. So I prefer the Bose QC 35. They’re lighter and more comfortable, and I am guilty of falling asleep with them, which might not be a healthy move, but it’s only on select red-eyes.

At this point it’s become a ritual for when I want to record vocals. I have positive memories of it feeling easier to sing and therefore me enjoying singing more. One trick is to wait until it has cooled down and not drink it when it’s hot but more like warm. Because, actually, hot drinks are not as good for your voice as warm drinks. Sometimes too much of a good thing isn’t a good thing at all.

Because I have these positive memories associated with the taste of Throat Coat tea, now sometimes if I want to drink a chill nonalcoholic beverage, I’ll have this. And, actually, I should say, a nonalcoholicandnon-caffeinated beverage. Those are hard to come by. So now I’ll have one for fun. It just tastes good.

The depiction of New York City in the ’90s, I’m into that. It’s up mystrasse, which is an expression someone taught me over the summer. I love seeing an aesthetic depiction of the city in the ’90s. I love the apartment in this show —the production designis flawless. I also love the music choices. I thought both the score and the needle drops were really special because I was ages 7 to 17 in the ’90s. So I do have a sense of what the music was like. I lived through it a little bit. And the songs they picked are not the biggest songs from that era. They are definitely your cool older brother’s best friend’s mixtape. “Set Adrift on Memory Bliss”by P.M. Dawnis an amazing choice. I actually didn’t know thePeter Gabriel song “Blood of Eden,”though I am a Peter Gabriel fan. It’s on my list of songs that I’m gonna listen to more.

I’m someone who’s not used to leaving the house with a bag unless I’m traveling. And then I’ll have a backpack. I’m used to traveling with a backpack, but recently I bought a cross-body bag, which I really like. It’s byPatagonia. But it is useful to throw an AirTag in there just so that if you walk away from the bag, because you’re not used to being out in the world with a bag, it’ll remind you that you walked away without your bag.

I feel like different car companies have kind of found and lost their way throughout automotive history in terms of design. But for whatever reason, the era of the early 2000s for Audi, BMW, Mercedes-Benz … I find there’s something magical about that era of design. I love the clean lines. The vehicles just look very natural to me. And as someone who was born in 1983 — I turned 17 in 2000 — it makes sense that it was my era.

I recently bought a car from 2005 and put CarPlay in it. It’s also a stick shift. So it’s this interesting mix of old and new technology, and every time I get in it, it makes me really happy. I start smiling and I’m catching myself smiling, like,Why am I so happy in this car?But there’s something about that era of design that hits my pleasure receptors. I actually had the dealership that I bought this car from install CarPlay before I ever drove a mile in it. And the reason is that the car is a stick shift. I just knew that driving a stick-shift car without CarPlay in this era is a recipe for disaster. You don’t want to have competing distractions. I wouldn’t really want to drive a stick-shift car that didn’t have CarPlay.

In the last ten years, I’ve been building up these libraries that I’ve made for myself. Basically, you go through and sample every note of the piano in your living room or the piano in your studio. You can record each hit of the drums. You can record them at different velocities. And you can create what are called round-robin samples, where every time you hit the same note it triggers a different sample. And by doing that, it makes it sound real.
So I’ve been kind of quietly amassing this library of sounds that are my own. I love using them to make music. Sometimes they don’t end up on the finished product, because you can then record real drums later down the line. But you can use the Kontakt library to make a drum beat, which can really help you along the way. It’s part of the creative process.

I guess that’s something that maybe is adapted from film scoring. I did a bit of scoring when I graduated from college, and I’ve done a couple film scores along the way. But in film scoring, you’re constantly sketching out what it will eventually sound like when it’s finished. So it’s nice to be able to have your own libraries to do that with. I think one issue with a lot of the sample libraries that you can buy on the internet — and there are hundreds — is that they often sound too perfect. They sound kind of lifeless. Whereas the ones that I have, the instruments have a bit more character, maybe because there’s less of a clinical approach to sampling. And they have a bit more swagger as a result.

I just looked down and I am wearing them right now. We all are on our feet a lot for various reasons, and I don’t trust any other socks. You wouldn’t catch me in cotton socks ever because I think cotton socks absorb moisture. Even if you wash them and dry them, I think there’s, like, components of that moisture that stays in there. Whereas a Smartwool sock, when it’s dry, it really is dry. So I trust those. And I’ve been loyal to my Smartwool socks for about ten years.

I like ankle socks. I know they’vebecome controversial. Someone described it as an “ankle socks epidemic.” I do think it’s context based. For example, you will never see me in khaki shorts and loafers. I don’t own khaki shorts and I don’t own loafers. And I think that is why I can wear ankle socks. Now, if I did own khaki shorts and loafers, and I wore khaki shorts and loafers, then you would never see me in ankle socks. So I think that people who have an aversion to ankle socks, it is because they want to wear loafers and khaki shorts. But I wouldn’t look good in loafers and khaki shorts. I know this about myself.

I needed a pair of shoes when I was in London. I really bought these out of necessity. I walked to the Salomon store and bought these because they seemed comfortable and I liked the way they looked. I liked them so much that when I got back to America, I wanted to buy more pairs. But it turns out the ones that they make in Europe are different from the ones in America. I couldn’t find the good ones in America. I didn’t like the colorways. They looked the same or they said that they were the same, but they weren’t actually the same. So then I found this website in Spain calledRunnerinnthat sells the European versions at a pretty big discount. I bought my parents each a pair of these shoes as well. And I bought myself a couple different pairs, and I also gave one of the pairs to my brother. So my whole family has these shoes now.

I wear them for literally everything. You could be on your feet all day, and at the end of the day, your feet don’t feel tired. And I’ve never had shoes that can do that except these. They’ve got a certain swagger. What’s nice about them is the shoe has a thick and supportive sole. You feel really planted.