Quotes from David Longstreth

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

Sometimes you get really bitter about how the prettiest images don't typically end up attached to the most interesting music. But I just take that as a challenge to try to do something cool.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.