His relationship with guitarist Amber Coffman was under considerable strain and while Longstreth still enjoyed the excitement of playing live, he knew it was time for a break. “The end of that tour was hard,” Longstreth says. “I love touring, I love playing shows, I love being out there sharing music with other people. It’s such a gift and a privilege. It’s weird when there’s these really opposing extremes. It was difficult.”
Longstreth broke-up with Coffman and entered something of a creative hiatus. To arrest his funk, Longstreth switched his focus away from writing and started to listen to music in a different way. Two years later he emerged with a new Dirty Projectors album, titled simply Dirty Projectors.
The new album is very much a break-up record, but Longstreth says it was more than just his emotional state that sparked him into creative action. “I think change can be good, when you disrupt your routine. It’s like an earthquake, the soil is coming up out where the fault lines shattered or something,” Longstreth says. “There were a lot of other things too, like not letting myself be a writer for a while, letting myself be a listener was super important.”
As well as moving from New York to Los Angeles, Longstreth spent long moments listening to new records such as Kendrick’s Good Kid Bad City, Drake’s Nothing Was the Same and Beyonce’s self-titled record from 2013. “Musically, they’re so interesting, they’re so direct, personal and honest. They were super inspiring to me. Letting myself be a collaborator and a helper, working as an arranger, a producer on other people’s things. Taking the time to be another spoke in the wheel. All these things informed the record.”
At the end of the Swing Lo Magellan tour Longstreth wasn’t sure what the future held for Dirty Projectors, the band he’d formed as a 19-year-old in 2002. “When I started Dirty Projectors, I wanted it to be a moveable feast, I wanted it to go wherever I wanted it to go musically. And I wanted to go everywhere musically,” Longstreth says. “I figured that would be a journey with a lot of change, a lot of different aesthetics, different styles, different collaborators.”
When Longstreth found himself in a similar creative space to previous Dirty Projectors record – albeit exploring rhythms and melodies far different than before – he knew he was working toward a new Dirty Projectors album. “To be in this situation where I’m thinking ‘Here is the beginning of this song – how do I make it grow? What kind of fertiliser do I pour on it, who do I take it to, what am I adding to it?’ It felt very familiar,” Longstreth says. “To be in that familiar place and to see them in that way, with new eyes and all the accrued experience of the last few years. It felt like ‘Oh wow, I’m home,’ but it felt different.”
In contrast to previous albums, where Longstreth started out with a defined group for each record, the new album grew organically. “This is the first record I’ve made in a while where the stance is not coming from an idea of a pre-existing group of players in mind and figuring out a way for those players to accomplish those arrangements. It was a case of ‘Here are the songs, and what kind of arrangements are they asking for,’ ” Longstreth says.
The order of the songs on the album reflects Longstreth’s cathartic emotional journey from “devastation and emotional incoherence and overwhelmed-ness,” to acceptance, to moving on. “I wasn’t thinking about it at the time but it’s been the journey of making these songs. I feel in a very different place now then when I started them,” Longstreth says.
Apart from playing a couple of songs at a benefit gig associated with the Women’s March in Washington last December, Longstreth hasn’t played any of the new material live. “I have a couple of ideas for different approaches of playing the album. I think I’m going to keep going down both of these roads, these different approaches until one establishes itself as the winner.”
By Patrick Emery
