What music can do so well is tell the truth in a subjective way.
— David Longstreth
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.
What genres are good for is being like, 'Here are the parameters. Here's something about the way it's going to make you feel. And here's something about the subject matter.'
Sexual harrassment and abuse is intolerable.
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.'
A song isn't a newspaper. It might feel direct, but it's not.
The more songs I've written, the more I've grown interested in telling a story. When I first began, I had this list of opaque phrases where you can make of it what you want.
Music has been there for me. Whether good or bad, it's the way that I process experience. As a listener and as a writer.
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.
Art can contextualise and buttress fame. So rather than being antagonistic in the way Fugazi would have had it in 1989, particularly in the present, maybe they are one - they belong to one another.
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.
There's been no two Dirty Projectors records that have had the same cast of characters every time.
I got a little baby grand piano off Craigslist for, like, $500. It's a beautiful instrument that you hear on a bunch of the songs. That's that piano on 'Keep Your Name' and 'Work Together' and 'Little Bubble.'
Fame can amplify the message of art in a remarkable, meaningful way.
I like the idea that songs can communicate in a way no other media can. That's why I write them.
Songs, a while ago, became the medium through which I process most of the information that I receive and feel. But I go back and forth about whether this is all of life or whether you're missing something important in living and whether or not, as a humanist, you're abnegating a certain responsibility if this - this art - is just where you are.
