Dirty Projectors' Dave Longstreth on Film Scoring, Bernie Sanders, and Disappearing into the Music
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Back to our regularly scheduled programming...I've been listening to Dirty Projectors since I was in short pants, and that's not just because I haven't worn shorts (bathing suit does not count) since 2008. Considering where he started from, Dave Longstreth has had a fascinating career (go and run back The Glad Fact if you don't believe me) and I've had him on my list of people to talk to for a while now. As it turns out, he's in the midst of a particularly busy streak right now: he just put out the ambitious Dirty Projectors record Song of the Earth, and his first-ever film score for The Legend of Ochi hits theaters this Friday. We hopped on a call a few weeks ago to talk through everything, check it out:
You've lived in L.A. for a decade now. What do you like about the city? What are the drawbacks?
When I was moving here from New York, what I'd noticed is that in order for me to write anything, the city was too loud, intense, and present in my mind. I'd always need to go somewhere else to write music. So I'd go upstate and have this strange period of 10 days, alone and entirely focused on music. Then, at a certain point I'd be like, "Oh my God, I'm a crazy person, I need to go down to Brooklyn and hang out with my friends." In Brooklyn, I had no solitude or quiet. I'd be down there hanging with friends, going to restaurants, spending money. It was this very polar existence.
The way I understood L.A. as an outsider was that it was more integrated with the
natural world, I felt like it was going to be the best of both worlds—and, of course, to view Los Angeles through the eyes of a New Yorker is the first mistake. But my life is more integrated between those two things, and I like it. There's also a hundred-year-old tradition of coming from New York to L.A. and being like, "What was my youth in the city like? What did it all mean?" At this point, I feel like I could probably live in New York in a way that I didn't know how to when I was there—even if it's just something like wearing comfortable shoes, or learning how to meditate and tune your world without the cooperation of externalities.
I was really surprised that this is your first film score. It seems like something that you'd be naturally suited to as an artist. Tell me how you ended up working on this one.
My involvement has a lot to do with my respect for Isaiah Saxon's vision and our friendship that grew across the last decade. He had this idea, and he's been slowly pushing it up the hill. Working on this comes out of my curiosity about the interaction of of image, story, and music—but, specifically, the way Isaiah's gears turn in that regard. I loved his work as Encyclopedia Pictura and all the incredible music videos that he's done.
The other side of it was that, in my career as a bandleader, I got to a point where I wanted to sit in the other chair. I want somebody to bandlead me, I want to be somebody's drummer. To be that for Isaiah is such a sophisticated, complex language that we all know so well, because we spend so much time watching things. But getting to a place where you're speaking it in an intentional way—there's a learning curve there. So to have Isaiah holding my hand through it and being my teacher was amazing.
Are you a movies guy in general?
I like films for sure. I'm not encyclopedic in any way.
What are some movies that you've seen in the last year or so that you've liked? It can be old, new, whatever.
Gosh, I have a four-year-old, so it hasn't been the most movie-intensive period of my life. I saw the Herzog documentary on Bruce Chatwin a couple weeks ago. I loved that. I saw a lot of the awards season stuff from last year. I loved Anora so much. I didn't love The Brutalist.
Yeah, I mean, I liked The Brutalist. I loved the score. The second half really lost me quite a bit, but I appreciated it for what it was.
Yeah. You really wanted a movie that affirmed that first scene where Adrian Brody's getting off the train and embracing his cousin, and he's just so emotional. I was like, "Yes, this movie about the immigrant experience, the promise of America, and the beauty of creating an art form is gonna be so awesome." And then it was so negative.
How's parenthood been going?
I've been loving it. I don't think we could've done it in a moment earlier in our lives, but I'm so grateful for our daughter's arrival in our lives. There's the chance, through her eyes, to see things again for the first time, revisit childhood, and rewrite the dynamics of parent and child. It's a really beautiful experience. She's so much fun, and such a crazy little kid.
Is there anything you've learned about yourself in the process?
These last four years have been emotional growth in a way that I didn't go through since being a teenager. Suddenly you're just like, "Wait a minute, what is my perception? Where am I in this? How do I feel?" It was this invitation to revisit everything and rewire the whole thing, and it's been psychedelic in that way.
You mentioned earlier the notion of stepping back from being a bandleader. Something I've noticed increasingly across Dirty Projectors records across the last decade—and this certainly includes Song of the Earth—is a real de-centering of your voice in terms of vocal presence. Talk to me about that decision and what's prompted it.
For some reason, I've been thinking recently about a class I took in college. This writer Michael Veal, who wrote this amazing biography of Fela Kuti, was teaching a class that was so influential for me—one of the biggest things that I took out of college. Going deep into Fela's music involves being very deep in it—James Brown's music, Miles Davis—and there was something Michael said one time when we were listening to Miles' "Rated X." Miles sets the palette, it's one of these crazy wide organ chords—a fuzzed-out Farfisa—and I remember Michael being like, "The scene is set, we're waiting for Miles to show up, and he never does. He just disappears into the music, 'cause there's no, Miles solo on the song. It's just the groove."
This idea of disappearing into the music—of your voice being there, even if it's not there—made something click for me. My voice could be the chords, the melody—I can be there even if I'm not literally singing it. There's just a wider range of colors, moods, tones, and energy available if I don't have to literally be the the dude saying the stuff.
With Song of the Earth specifically, I was thinking of it almost as landscape music. I had this idea about how the phone really clarifies—or reifies, maybe—these two modes. There's the portrait and there's the landscape. It's almost a binary now. This is all getting very tinfoil-hat, but as recording, in the one sense, becomes easier, we can do it on our phones. Recording is essentially word processing, and music has become, in a way, more like verbal communication. Songs are almost always portrait mode—it's a headshot, it's me, I'm singing to the camera. So what if
Song of the Earth is just on its side and there's more instrumental music?
I love Chris Weisman's music, and I love him as a philosopher. If you're on a text thread with him, he's just dropping spicy takes all the time, and the world needs them. He's averse to the internet, which makes sense. I remember he said one time a couple of years ago, "Instrumental music is the future. Vocals are on the way out." I love that. With Song of the Earth, I was trying to take him literally, as opposed to seriously.
I'm not telling you anything you don't know here, but around Bitte Orca, you obviously had this massive swell in visibility in terms of your work. As somebody who'd been listening to you since the beginning, it was very surprising. What was that like for you?
Gosh, I'm struggling to present anything cogent. It was really gratifying, on the one hand, to have people hear the music and connect with it. Echoing what you're saying, it felt improbable, because the music was not the most obvious thing. It comes out of this tradition of indie rock where there's an intentional roughness or difficulty to it—a rawness, or amateurism. It was a little bit confusing to have that thrust toward the center of a cultural moment.
It was also confusing, because as I'm sure other people you've spoken with about this have said, even in the boom times it's still rough to thrive as a small business. Being in a rock band, we were always the very smallest you could be to still need a bus, so we'd be in these venues where there's six of us and a four-person crew, so being in a bus is more economical than two sprinters and hotel rooms. But the economics of being in a bus and then trying to do a national tour where we're playing in St. Louis and Dallas, it's always rough.
In a way, we all felt this burning imperative to succeed. There's artistic success, but there's also the success of this capitalist framework that we hadn't really been able, at that point in our lives, to step out entirely outside of and contextualize as its own trap. So it was very strange.
Were there any ridiculous offers from brands or advertisers that you had to weigh out or even reject?
Honestly, I wish. [Laughs] We did a couple of Bob Dylan covers for Levi's. The dynamics of the music industry were still very different than they are now, so there was still a somewhat of a framework around "selling out"—this question of what it meant to be true to yourself as an artist. I remember it feeling like a complex thing for us to really figure out. Can we do this Levi's thing and still be ourselves? Can we go and have them pay for a day in the recording studio where we record three Dylan covers and there's a photographer in there for 40 minutes taking pictures of us as we sing? Can we do that? In hindsight, it feels easier to be like, "Well, yes, this would help defray gasoline expenses for the bus" or whatever. We did that, and I'm glad we did.
Honestly, given the way the actual economics of the music industry worked, there weren't enough of those things for us to really keep doing what we were doing and have it not fall apart. This stuff is so arbitrary, but we didn't get a lot of syncs. We were in NBA 2K13, which was curated by JAY-Z. I still meet young people in their early 20s who like Dirty Projectors because "Stillness Is the Move" was in that game.
Portraits of Tracy, who's on Song of the Earth—an incredible talent, I'm so excited to see what she does nexst and getting to know her a little bit has been amazing—she was like, "Yeah dude, I'm seven years old playing NBA 2K13 and 'Stillness Is the Move' comes on, I'm like, 'What the fuck is this?'" She was growing up in rural Louisiana or something. That's a positive way to feel about in a more traditionally lindie framework in the unholy marriage of art and commerce.
You've probably seen the music industry change four or five times over at this point. What are the big shifts that you've witnessed in terms of direct experience?
When I was starting out playing shows—from 18 to 21 or 22 years old—I was making albums on Tascam cassette four-tracks, and I'd bounce live mixes in on the four-track. I'd make a stereo mix onto a cassette master—a mass-produced cassette that you could get at Radio Shack, which, Radio Shack doesn't even exist anymore. From there, somehow I'd digitize it, because I remember cold-sending CDs and demos to record labels that I really loved—Secretly Canadian, Western Vinyl, Drag City, Matador.
The very first thing I did was an album called The Graceful Fallen Mango that I made the year after high school, and I was amazed that people emailed me back. Brian Sampson from Western Vinyl emailed me back. Chris Swanson from Secretly Canadian emailed me back. So I've known these guys since the year 2000, sending them handmade CD-Rs, making drawings and photocopying them and making a homemade package out of cardboard and a CD. This is before the advent of streaming, by 10 years. These small, independent labels were totally different from an idea of a musical mainstream.
Even though I grew up on the East coast, my context of this community is based on the time that I spent in Portland, Oregon, following my brother around—the K Records ethic of his friend group—this little label called Magic Marker that put out some Dear Nora and Wolf Colonel 7"s and house shows that were literally in people's living rooms, friends playing songs for each other. And that really was what it was prior to MySpace: You know somebody who knows somebody where you can play in Boise.
For me, it was very experiential coming right out of college. I'm thinking of it in a musically ambitious way, but at that time as a young person, what appealed to me was the simultaneity of low stakes and a high sense of possibility. So streaming comes 10 years later and there's the collapse of the CD industry, which brings the mainstream closer to indie—everything goes online. Streaming didn't really come along until the second record with Domino, Swing Lo Magellan, and Instagram started between Bitte Orca and Swing Lo Magellan. It turned toward like a more online culture, it was gradual and now it feels complete.
The labels were the places that curated. As a listener, you'd know a record label because you'd know what their vibes were: "I like the stuff that comes out on Matador, and I've never heard Silver Jews, but I know I like Pavement." It's constantly changing now.
You're doing the Bernie Sanders event this coming weekend in L.A.. Talk to me about getting involved with that and what that means to you.
I did some Bernie stuff in Iowa with the Vampire Weekend guys and my brother nine years ago. When I saw that Bernie and AOC were doing this L.A. rally, I hit them up and was like, "I don't know if you guys are doing any music, but if you need anybody to be up there Pete Seeger'ing out with an acoustic singing 'This Land Is Your Land,' let me be that guy. Then they announced that Neil Young, Joan Baez, and Maggie Rogers are all playing. So I'm just getting up there. Bernie is an inspiring figure, and he's got good ideas. It's the smallest thing that I could do, and we definitely need some good ideas these days.