David Longstreth

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.

People like to put music and art up against the dehumanizing character of commerce and business corporations.

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.

Ninety percent of touring is a logistical maneuver, moving your body and everyone else's from one city to the next. You're like a piece of gear. Then you jump out of the box, get onstage, and play. That sounds cynical, but it sucks to move around so much.

Steely Dan is a band I'm not that into. Well, I guess I like certain singles.

What music can do so well is tell the truth in a subjective way.

When you make a melody that doesn't come with words from the get-go, sometimes you're just thinking about random vowel sounds that go with it - and it's really, really hard to write lyrics that actually obey the vowel sounds.

Most of the creative industries have been deskilled by these really powerful ideologies of punk in music and Warhol in the visual arts. I think it would be great for us collectively to ask whether it's had a negative or positive effect in contributing imaginative stuff to our culture.

I never really thought of music as a particularly social thing. I experienced music through recordings as opposed to concerts. It just makes you think about the way things are put together, the way things are written as opposed to the showbusiness of something onstage, so no regrets there.

When we're talking about friendships, generosity and fairness and equanimity and sharing and all those things are super-important to me.

To be in the woods is a special thing. And also just the concept of wilderness as a necessary opposite in a kind of global dialectic. I want there to be wilderness where there are no humans in a world like this. So nature is super important.

It's helpful to just hear things through friends' ears, people who know you well. I guess when I started Dirty Projectors, when I was, like, 20, I always imagined it would be kind of like an amphibious vehicle: something that could go with me wherever I need to go. That kind of constant change has been in the DNA from the beginning.