David Longstreth

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I remember when that Kelis song 'Milkshake' came out, and just how extreme it seemed in terms of that really high triangle part and then the really low subs and then her voice in the middle.”

“Just like any songwriter, the songs come out of where I am in my life and what I'm doing and who I'm hanging out with and the kind of sounds I'm imagining. I always loved the idea of it evolving in the same way that life changes.”

“The thing that transforms something from being an idea to being a physical reality is work.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I loved 'Nothing Was the Same' so much. For me, that was the first Drake record that I got into.”

“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'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.”

“With 'Stillness', I don't think I appreciated how very codified all the different genres were in radio formats and the various constituencies of the culture. But music is music, too.”

“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.”

“Every Dirty Projectors album is a world unto itself.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I was obsessed with what a song was and what the possibilities of language in a song are.”