David Longstreth

“Working as a producer, an arranger, and, in some cases, as a writer for some other people gave me a super different perspective.”

“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 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.”

“You don't write songs, really, when you're on tour.”

“People like to put music and art up against the dehumanizing character of commerce and business corporations.”

“I love 808s - not only the Auto-Tune but just ,in general, the embrace of a kind of digital style of working.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Sexual harrassment and abuse is intolerable.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Fame can amplify the message of art in a remarkable, meaningful way.”

“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.'”

“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.”

“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.”

“Bjork has this kind of abstraction and formalism that you associate with art music or avant-garde music.”

“A lot of my vocals were the first time I ever sang the song.”