Quotes from David Longstreth

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

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.'

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.

To be in the woods is a special thing. And also just the concept of wilderness as a necessary opposite in a kind of global dialectic. I want there to be wilderness where there are no humans in a world like this. So nature is super important.

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 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.

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.'

The idea of letting a recording be a moment in time appealed to me. With digital recording, it's easy to create a perfect text of whatever song you have.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

What appeals to me about 'Blind Willie' is just how sparse that music is. Just this idea - the grain of it, the rawness of it and the simplicity of it. The directness of the language.

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.

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.

Steely Dan is a band I'm not that into. Well, I guess I like certain singles.

Sexual harrassment and abuse is intolerable.

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.

I'm the worst at favourites! I don't have one - I love all my children, I love them all equally.

I'm super interested in visual, and I love that being in a band can be as much about making an image as it is about making a sound.

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.

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.