Words matter. These are the best David Longstreth Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Being in a band can be really toxic to being in a relationship, considering all the touring and everything. Sometimes when you’re on tour, it feels like you’re living the same day over and over again.
There’s been no two Dirty Projectors records that have had the same cast of characters every time.
I just have these terrible memories of our first European tour back in 2007. We had hired this van and tour service from the former Czech Republic called Fluff Wheels, and they sent us out with this 19-year-old vegan driver kid who had no money and refused to eat anything.
You can have outlandish ideas, but if you don’t work at them, they just remain outlandish ideas. Anyone can have an idea. Work is transformative.
A song isn’t a newspaper. It might feel direct, but it’s not.
The thing that transforms something from being an idea to being a physical reality is work.
The people I really admire, like William Blake and John Coltrane and Richard Wagner, had these ridiculously full universes that took their entire lives to describe.
At the end of the touring on Bitte, looking back on all that stuff, I feel really proud of having written that music and of us for having really played awesomely on those tours.
When it comes to music, I am a dictator. Making a Dirty Projectors record come to life is like making a movie; I’m the one that makes the picture, and then we all figure out how to realise it.
I’d always tended to regard song lyrics as sort of a bastard medium because they’re subjugated under the music. If you were to regard them as poetry, it would be bad, embarrassing, confessional poetry – a lot of the lyrics I love.
Fame can amplify the message of art in a remarkable, meaningful way.
Working as a producer, an arranger, and, in some cases, as a writer for some other people gave me a super different perspective.
Dirty Projectors has always been a band that’s been card-carrying modernists in terms of pushing different kinds of abstraction to the fore and trying to take them to the center of the culture or something like that.
I remember when I first saw ‘Guided by Voices’; those earlier recordings are so deconstructed, kind of like four-track music, and so artful in their collage and in their weird fragility.
The first musical stuff I worked on was after the tour for ‘Swing Lo Magellan’ had ended and I didn’t really know what else to do. I didn’t know what music I would write. I just did work for other people – arranging, producing, writing – and all of that seemed to be in L.A.
What music can do so well is tell the truth in a subjective way.
I was obsessed with what a song was and what the possibilities of language in a song are.
I’m from the East Coast; I think about things dialectically sometimes – in other words, antagonistically. The rhythms that I think of are polyrhythmic, bouncy, loping. The way that I want to approach that is to get, like, a flat-footed Connecticut hard-core drummer to play these bouncy, loping polyrhythms.
I never really thought of music as a particularly social thing. I experienced music through recordings as opposed to concerts. It just makes you think about the way things are put together, the way things are written as opposed to the showbusiness of something onstage, so no regrets there.
A lot of my vocals were the first time I ever sang the song.
For somebody like Kanye, fame is the fullest realisation of his art in a way. It’s like an Andy Warhol dream or something. He’s able to marshal all of these different artforms and media into his story, in this very layered, idiosyncratic way.
When I would go over to friends’ houses, and they would be zoning out to Mario Brothers, I just found it the most distasteful thing.
People like to put music and art up against the dehumanizing character of commerce and business corporations.
I used to feel that musical knowledge and emotional truth-telling were antagonistic. But I was too curious about chords and instruments and recording to stay locked in that mentality.
Sexual harrassment and abuse is intolerable.
To be in the woods is a special thing. And also just the concept of wilderness as a necessary opposite in a kind of global dialectic. I want there to be wilderness where there are no humans in a world like this. So nature is super important.
Ninety percent of touring is a logistical maneuver, moving your body and everyone else’s from one city to the next. You’re like a piece of gear. Then you jump out of the box, get onstage, and play. That sounds cynical, but it sucks to move around so much.
A song is about heartbreak – but what are the constituent feelings? What are the aspects? There is anger, there is guilt, there are all these different things. I guess putting those voices into dialogue together just felt real.
When the Swing Lo Magellan touring wound up, it felt like the end of something for me, and I needed a break from touring. But really, the co-writing and producing I did after this gave me a different perspective on this whole thing. To me, that was like being a different spoke on the wheel.
I do have my more concept-y albums, and then I have the ones that are more about just collections of songs. For me, the first Dirty Projectors record that I put out was like that: ‘The Glad Fact.’
When we’re talking about friendships, generosity and fairness and equanimity and sharing and all those things are super-important to me.
A lot of the music I was inspired by growing up – college rock, DIY, what they used to call indie rock – has a value system where truth-telling and authenticity are oppositional with mass media, showbiz, and commerce.
I do think that one of the best effects the Internet has had on music is that it’s allowed these false walls between different music communities to vaporize. We can see that this is a big, complex, interconnected web.
Making a movie really frees up the way you think.
When you make a melody that doesn’t come with words from the get-go, sometimes you’re just thinking about random vowel sounds that go with it – and it’s really, really hard to write lyrics that actually obey the vowel sounds.
