“This
band is definitely Dirty Projectors,” Longstreth says of the current lineup,
which pairs the guitarist with drummer Brian McOmber, bassist Nat Baldwin and
Amber Coffman, Angel Deradoorian and Haley Dekle, a trio of angel-voiced
singers and instrumentalists who form a distinct chorus. “With prior lineups, I
would write a big batch of songs myself and want to take them out, play some
shows with some people, so I’d always thought of Dirty Projectors as something
of a collective, not as a band. I didn’t like the idea of making it something
static, you know? I just tried to outfit the different songs the way they
wanted to be orchestrated.”
That
changed with Bitte Orca, the first
Dirty Projectors album Longstreth wrote with set musicians in mind.
“Before,
I wrote songs super-abstractly, feeling them out of nothing,” Longstreth says.
“With Bitte Orca, I actively wanted
to make music that was made by this group of people. I made some parts for
Brian, considering the kind of drummer that Brian is; I created guitar parts
that specifically interlock between Amber and I, and I wrote a song for Angel
that specifically gets at the color of her aura.”
It
was a piece written for Coffman that emerged as the album’s standout. With its
slinky, contemporary R&B groove and African guitar tones, “Stillness Is the
Move” built on already familiar Dirty Projectors influences, but Coffman’s
sharp, resolute voice sold the song in a way Longstreth’s strained trills never
could. With Coffman at the lead, it became an honest-to-god R&B song, so
much so that it was covered last fall by honest-to-god R&B singer Solange
Knowles—Beyoncé’s younger sister. A modest Internet hit, the cover became the
most cited example of how indie-rock crossed genre boundaries last year.
“When
I first started making music, people would be like, ‘This is so crazy, you’re
combining folk music and orchestral arrangements and R&B beats,’”
Longstreth recalls. “But now it’s a common thing. It’s really natural to do. I
think that people who are making music now just listened to everything when
they were a little younger. It’s very natural that what you love and what you
listen to makes its way into what you write.”
That
would explain why Dirty Projectors’ R&B accents suggest in particular
Timbaland’s turn-of-the-century productions, which proliferated around the time
Longstreth was in high school and college, when music tends to make its most
lasting impression.
“I’ve
been listening to this mixtape that a friend made me—well, it’s not even really
a mixtape, because it’s five gigs—but it’s called Rap Singles, 1978-2005, and I’ve been really wrapped up in years
’96 to ’97 in the last week or so,” Longstreth says. “I’ve been listening to
the early 2000s, too, and remembering all that stuff. That was a point where
the production was just so advanced.”
Longstreth
says he still follows rap and R&B music, albeit not with the same intensity
he did when he was younger.
“It’s
great to check in with it, because it evolves so quickly,” he says. “It can go
through a good period and a bad period really fast. The late ’90s were a great
period, the early and mid of the last decade were good. Some of it’s in a rut
right now, with how quantized and tuned everything is, and that relentless
hi-hat from post-crunk—it just doesn’t quite breathe very much. But I think it
changes so fast. It’s even getting good again.”
Dirty Projectors headline the Pabst Theater on Saturday, Sept. 18, at 8 p.m. with openers Happy Birthday.
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