American - Musician | December 17, 1981 -
It's helpful to just hear things through friends' ears, people who know you well. I guess when I started Dirty Projectors, when I was, like, 20, I always imagined it would be kind of like an amphibious vehicle: something that could go with me wherever I need to go. That kind of constant change has been in the DNA from the beginning.
David Longstreth
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A few things I've noticed about myself as a listener, and the music that I relate to and the music that's continued to mean something to me since I was a little kid or a teenager, is that they're songs that tell stories and songs that come from a place of experience.
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I made, like, five records as Dirty Projectors before I got out of college. And then I put a band together when I got interested in going on tour around that time.
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What Joanna and Solange and Kanye all had in common was a mental image of what the sound is supposed to be. As a collaborator, my goal has to be to help them get toward that mental image. That was cool.
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Bjork has this kind of abstraction and formalism that you associate with art music or avant-garde music.
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When I first heard Bjork's music, I felt like I was a similar-minded thinker, both harmonically and melodically. She takes those things that you naturally assume to be opposite because they're presented that way most of the time, and the way she twines them together is so beautiful. To be able to do that is so powerful.
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One of the things I really like about West African guitar playing is the way it makes harmony linear. They're really spelling things out and turning chords into melodies instead of just letting them be these hanging blocks of color.
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Steely Dan is a band I'm not that into. Well, I guess I like certain singles.
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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.
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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.
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The thing that transforms something from being an idea to being a physical reality is work.
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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.
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