Interview: David Longstreth of Dirty Projectors

Published on Tuesday 22 June 2010 16:00

With a celebrity following as diverse as their influences, Dirty Projectors' David Longstreth tells Aidan Smith how the eclecticism is continuing with an orchestral extravaganza at the Barbican closely followed by T in the Park

• David Longstreth, third from right, with the rest of the band

SO MANY bands get labelled "wacky" and "oddball" and "leftfield" now that you imagine this field must be pretty crowded. It's certainly pretty bovine, with everyone bumping around, comparing cultural references and haircuts, assuming that "art-rock" can be achieved through quick chord changes alone and wondering how on earth to spell "psychedelic". So what a pleasure to encounter the Dirty Projectors, real avant-gardists, genuinely out there, dreaming up crazy operas about the meaning of life.

Three minutes into my chat with lead Projectionist David Longstreth and I'm lost. The last signpost I recognised was for Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, site of the bloodiest battle of the American Civil War. What throws me is mention of the Eagles whose only connection with the Civil War, I thought, was that they've always reckoned themselves to be no less important to US history. Lost, then, but in a good way.

Seek more insight about the Dirty Projectors from their MySpace page and you'll find a photo of Beyonc. The bootilicious R&B queen is listed as one of the band's 31,269 friends alongside Vampire Weekend and Grizzly Bear. Like the latter they're into orchestration and in common with the former they're big on African rhythms, only they're considerably weirder and more wonderful than both.

"It's great that Beyonc's into us because I love her voice, her tunes and her work ethic," says Longstreth, 27, when I catch up with him in Brooklyn. "She and Jay-Z came to see us play (Californian festival] Coachella recently, although we didn't get the chance to meet her. But we're already good friends with her sister Solange and have played with her a few times."

Solange has also recorded Stillness Is The Move, the standout track from the Dirty Projectors' breakout album Bitte Orca. The Knowles sisters probably love the band back for their dabblings in R&B, and that's fine, but it's their earlier work which sets Longstreth apart from the herd, earns him comparisons with David Byrne as the most revered musician on the New York scene and brings us back to the Civil War, and to Don Henley.

The Getty Address was the album before the album before Bitte Orca, and Longstreth describes it now as an adolescent's attempt to make sense of the universe. It's a story of cultural imperialism using the Civil War and Aztec cosmology – "my big obsession at the time." The central character is based on the conquistador Hernan Cortez and Stephen Dedalus, James Joyce's alter ego but, most significantly, Henley.

How so? "Well, the Eagles have always been right there," he says. "On FM radio, in my parents' record collection, they were inescapable when I was growing up; like the weather. Some days it was sunny, others it was rainy. Fast Eagles, slow Eagles – always the Eagles."

Born in Connecticut, he grew up free from the influence of TV and computer games. He went to Yale to study classical music, loved Wagner but didn't fit in. "I hung out with no one." Quitting the course (though it would be completed later), he embarked on his career as a mad genius which would feature an entire album by US punks Black Flag, replayed from memory by the Dirty Projectors.

He wrote The Getty Address for 20 players. "Two chamber ensembles, a women's chorus, seven wind instruments and a string octet. Then I chopped up the music, layered it with these beats – and realised I'd made an album that could never be performed live."

Until now. Following on from performances in New York and Los Angeles, the Dirty Projectors bring his magnum opus to London's Barbican this week, having found an orchestra undaunted by its dizzying rhythms. A challenging evening lies ahead, with Longstreth adding: "Don Henley is, in a way, an avatar for my older brother. Sometimes I think of the work as being about that guy who wrote Take It Easy but other times it's definitely about Jake." Henley's views would be interesting – "We tried to get him to the LA show but he was making a speech at his kids' graduation" – as indeed would Beyonc's.

The Dirty Projectors with which she'll be more familiar play T in the Park next month: a line-up of three guys and three girls in which Longstreth arranges the vocals of Amber Coffman, Angel Deradoorian and Haley Dekle in the "hocketing" style of 13th-century French monks. He's always admired R&B. "Back when I was at college, delivering pizzas was a high-water mark for producers like Timbaland and the Neptunes, when the singers were getting really melodramatic, and my van radio was permanently tuned to the hip-hop station." But it was only after meeting Coffman, his girlfriend and a real R&B obsessive, that he decided to incorporate elements into the Dirty Projectors' sound.

It's a much more accessible sound these days but, in reviving The Getty Address just as his band have been Beyonc-approved, Longstreth could hardly be accused of selling out. Comparisons with David Byrne, who at the height of Talking Heads' fame scored a ballet, are entirely valid. Both are tall, arty, driven, New York-based, into Mali grooves and endlessly questing and experimental.

Longstreth has recorded with Byrne, and composed a seven-part vocal suite for Bjrk. These collaborations have been "real cool" but, typical of the man, he's uncomfortable with the approbation of his intellectual-rock peers. "We're caught in this gyre of cultural rehashing right now and maybe it would be cooler if these greats from the 1980s and 1990s could not even recognise the music the likes of me were making, that it was all this intolerable noise."

Possibly he's too clever for his own good. In the words of Don Henley, he should just take it easy.

Dirty Projectors play T in the Park on 9 July

&#149 This article was first published in Scotland on Sunday on 20 June.