David Longstreth

“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.”

“Making a movie really frees up the way you think.”

“I wasn't into chimpanzees or gorillas because I kinda felt like they were the Coke and Pepsi of the primate world.”

“There's been no two Dirty Projectors records that have had the same cast of characters every time.”

“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.”

“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.'”

“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.”

“Most of the creative industries have been deskilled by these really powerful ideologies of punk in music and Warhol in the visual arts. I think it would be great for us collectively to ask whether it's had a negative or positive effect in contributing imaginative stuff to our culture.”

“One thing that I've often done under the Projectors is build an album from a central conceit.”

“When it comes to music, I am a dictator. Making a Dirty Projectors record come to life is like making a movie; I'm the one that makes the picture, and then we all figure out how to realise it.”

“As far as working with Kanye and Solange, that was amazing. After 'Swing Lo Magellan', I needed a change. Getting to work in that capacity, writing for other people and working for other people as a writer and as a person who's not representing it as the front person or whatever - it's such a different perspective you can get.”

“Kanye has this discursive way of working, getting input from a range of people, that I thought was really cool.”

“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.”

“When we're talking about friendships, generosity and fairness and equanimity and sharing and all those things are super-important to me.”

“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.”

“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 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.”

“What music can do so well is tell the truth in a subjective way.”

“When you make a melody that doesn't come with words from the get-go, sometimes you're just thinking about random vowel sounds that go with it - and it's really, really hard to write lyrics that actually obey the vowel sounds.”

“I like the idea that songs can communicate in a way no other media can. That's why I write them.”