Quotes from David Longstreth

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.

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.

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.

A song isn't a newspaper. It might feel direct, but it's not.

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.

Every Dirty Projectors album is a world unto itself.

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.

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.

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.'

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

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

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

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.