David Longstreth and Dirty Projectors: Songs and Process

Archive note: This newly written account revisits David Longstreth and Dirty Projectors, a subject from Grandpa Style’s earlier history. It focuses on the Swing Lo Magellan period through contemporary interviews, rather than reproducing the original feature or its photography.

Starting with the song

What changes when a musician makes the individual song the starting point? For David Longstreth, Dirty Projectors’ Swing Lo Magellan, listed in Domino’s release catalogue as a 2012 album, offered a way to explore that question.

In a July 2012 interview with The FADER, Longstreth described moving away from the overarching concepts of earlier records. Familiar songwriting methods had become a fresh challenge. He was particularly interested in words and melody carrying the same emotional direction: the lyric’s meaning mattered alongside the sound of the voice. The album’s coherence emerged from relationships between songs written individually.

When demos became the record

The recording process allowed early ideas to survive. In the publicly available opening of his Tape Op interview, published in January 2013, Longstreth described working at a rented house in upstate New York. Writing, demoing and finishing recordings overlapped. Although more polished rerecordings had been planned, the feel of early takes made them worth keeping. The rhythm section also recorded together; vocals were handled separately.

Different kinds of space

Longstreth’s account of “Offspring Are Blank” makes the arrangement more concrete. He described a chorus with the sense of musicians playing in a room, set against a verse assembled from an 808, altered percussion and layered harmonies. Contrasting spaces could exist inside one song. In that explanation, the room and the constructed recording are both compositional tools, each giving a section its own character.

A creative process worth revisiting

Our reading of these accounts is that a clear songwriting framework can leave plenty of room for experimentation. They also suggest a useful question for anyone making something: which qualities of an early version deserve to survive revision? Finishing a work involves deciding what to retain as well as what to improve.

For another perspective on selection and reworking, read our account of Matt Maust’s collage and typography. More historical profiles of creative people and their practices are collected in the Grandpa Style Archive.