David Longstreth
One thing that I've often done under the Projectors is build an album from a central conceit.
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.
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.
What appeals to me about 'Blind Willie' is just how sparse that music is. Just this idea - the grain of it, the rawness of it and the simplicity of it. The directness of the language.
A lot of my vocals were the first time I ever sang the song.
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.
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.
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.
I loved 'Nothing Was the Same' so much. For me, that was the first Drake record that I got into.
I think, for Solange, it was important to make a super-strong direct statement with 'A Seat at the Table,' and she thought 'Cool Your Heart' was kind of a summer jam that didn't really fit.
People like to put music and art up against the dehumanizing character of commerce and business corporations.
I wasn't into chimpanzees or gorillas because I kinda felt like they were the Coke and Pepsi of the primate world.
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've been good at creating new textures and new fabrics, like vocal hocketing, or interlocking guitars, or suggesting new ideas for style... that's what the band has really excelled at.
I've always loved cuneiform; I've always loved the way it looks. I love that it's the world's oldest script. And the creative potential of bad translation or misunderstanding or something has always been at the core of the idea of 'Dirty Projectors.' So the cuneiform is pretty playful - basically, just a joke.
Sometimes you get really bitter about how the prettiest images don't typically end up attached to the most interesting music. But I just take that as a challenge to try to do something cool.Collection: Interesting
I do feel like the hardest thing is to do something simple and tap into whatever remains of our common language rather than cultivating your own willfully esoteric vocabulary.Collection: Simple
I love that, for Kanye [West], there's no difference between the epic and the personal. That makes him sound like a really grandiose douche - which, I don't think anyone, himself included, could contest - but at the same time, it's really amazing. I love the scope of his perfectionism.Collection: Thinking
Clearly, things are definitely changing in big ways as far as the way we consume music, listen to music, and what we expect from music.Collection: Way
You think about, like, [20th-century classical composers] Alban Berg, Schoenberg, and Webern sitting around in some living room in Vienna and being like, "We are the end of music. We are the end of this tradition. Music is done."Collection: Thinking
I'm the worst at favourites! I don't have one - I love all my children, I love them all equally.Collection: Children
There's a certain power in vague language, but I started to get more into the idea of really trying to have a discrete thought in the lyrics and to have songs that were about stuff - to try to make things more coherent.Collection: Song
I feel like the world is super different now than it was in 2009. And to get at something that's somewhat darker, harsher, rougher, and a bit more challenging feels right.Collection: Challenges
I'm super interested in visual, and I love that being in a band can be as much about making an image as it is about making a sound.Collection: Sound
I think certain people would be moved to be nostalgic about America's glory days, when the music set the tone for the cultural conversation and popular musicians had this absurd level of authority.Collection: Thinking
Sometimes when you're on tour, it feels like you're living the same day over and over again.Collection: Sometimes
The idea of letting a recording be a moment in time appealed to me. With digital recording, it's easy to create a perfect text of whatever song you have.Collection: Song
You have to figure out as a band how a band becomes a business, and then you have to keep that business mentality separate from the creative one, which is good for the songs. It's always a work in progress.Collection: Song
It's a weird job because making music or writing a song is a personal thing... and it kind of has to be. You can always tell when people are faking.Collection: Song