Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Sexual harrassment and abuse is intolerable.
Every Dirty Projectors album is a world unto itself.
A lot of my vocals were the first time I ever sang the song.
A song isn't a newspaper. It might feel direct, but it's not.
What music can do so well is tell the truth in a subjective way.
Fame can amplify the message of art in a remarkable, meaningful way.
Steely Dan is a band I'm not that into. Well, I guess I like certain singles.
I was obsessed with what a song was and what the possibilities of language in a song are.
Sometimes when you're on tour, it feels like you're living the same day over and over again.
One thing that I've often done under the Projectors is build an album from a central conceit.
I like the idea that songs can communicate in a way no other media can. That's why I write them.
I'm the worst at favourites! I don't have one - I love all my children, I love them all equally.
I loved 'Nothing Was the Same' so much. For me, that was the first Drake record that I got into.
Bjork has this kind of abstraction and formalism that you associate with art music or avant-garde music.
I love 808s - not only the Auto-Tune but just ,in general, the embrace of a kind of digital style of working.
People like to put music and art up against the dehumanizing character of commerce and business corporations.
Kanye has this discursive way of working, getting input from a range of people, that I thought was really cool.
I wasn't into chimpanzees or gorillas because I kinda felt like they were the Coke and Pepsi of the primate world.
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.
Working as a producer, an arranger, and, in some cases, as a writer for some other people gave me a super different perspective.
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.
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.
Clearly, things are definitely changing in big ways as far as the way we consume music, listen to music, and what we expect from music.
When we're talking about friendships, generosity and fairness and equanimity and sharing and all those things are super-important to me.
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.
It's a weird job because making music or writing a song is a personal thing... and it kind of has to be. You can always tell when people are faking.
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.
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.
I feel like the world is super different now than it was in 2009. And to get at something that's somewhat darker, harsher, rougher, and a bit more challenging feels right.
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.
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.'
I do feel like the hardest thing is to do something simple and tap into whatever remains of our common language rather than cultivating your own willfully esoteric vocabulary.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.'
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.
I think certain people would be moved to be nostalgic about America's glory days, when the music set the tone for the cultural conversation and popular musicians had this absurd level of authority.
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 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.
You have to figure out as a band how a band becomes a business, and then you have to keep that business mentality separate from the creative one, which is good for the songs. It's always a work in progress.
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.'
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.