Dirty Projectors' Dave Longstreth Pops His Musical Bubble To Live For A Little Bit

"You cannot know someone through the way they represent themselves in art or online," says Dave Longstreth. "You only know them when you know them."

The 35-year-old leader of Dirty Projectors is talking, in theory, about "the gulf between the presentational self and the actual one". But, really, Longstreth is addressing — in philosophical terms — the notion that Dirty Projectors, the eighth album he's released under his adopted handle, is his most clearly autobiographical album yet, a breakup record charting the end of the relationship between Longstreth and his one-time, long-time bandmate, Amber Coffman.

The first single for the album, Keep Your Name, announced the changed reality of Dirty Projectors. No longer was it Longstreth and the increasingly permanent band that had grown around him since 2007's Rise Above, the 'Black Flag reimagined from memory' concept album that, five LPs in, served as Dirty Projectors' breakout, with Longstreth's erratic, ecstatic vocals to the harmonies of Coffman and Angel Deradoorian. Instead, Dirty Projectors had reverted to Longstreth's solo project, something it had been for the band's first four records. "Maybe there is that element," Longstreth says, "of having gone on a long journey only to find myself where I started, back home, but with new eyes."

The lyrics of Keep Your Name are filled with bitterness and bile, accusations and transmissions from a relationship turned sour. And, musically, it took what was previously the most sincere moment in a career long on conceptual hijinks — the sweet, unaffected, Beatles-esque from Dave to Amber love song Impregnable Question, a highlight from 2012's Swing Lo Magellan — and perverted it, the comeback single strewn with a distorted, disfigured sample of the band's own jam. Second single, Little Bubble, followed by sounding a bittersweet lament for a dreamlife lost. And, then, third single Up In Hudson confirmed the belief that a breakup record was looming: its lyrics openly chronicling the relationship between Longstreth and Coffman: from the first time he saw her (on stage at the Bowery Ballroom), to when he wrote her Stillness Is The Move, to seeing "the world, side by side, from the road and the stage", to the pair "going [their] separate ways".

"These songs all originated from being sad. Sometimes I go to music as a way of understanding the world, and the way that I feel."

This is the song to bring up when Longstreth, talking in his newly adopted home of Los Angeles, tries to deflect talk of his new LP's personal quality. "Yeah, of course I can recognise versions of us in that story," he says. "But, even if it's about our history, about Dirty Projectors, I'd caution that it's still a story... A lot of the music that I really love, the lyrics have a story in them, so I wanted to tell stories in these songs. It would be a mistake to think these stories are pure confessionals, that [the LP] just describes reality. The album is not a diary, it's not a journal, it's not a newspaper. It's a kaleidoscope."

Longstreth will admit, though, that the starting point for these jams, and for Dirty Projectors, was heartbreak. "These songs all originated from being sad," he says. "Sometimes I go to music as a way of understanding the world, and the way that I feel. I started making the songs for this album in that kind of headspace, without totally thinking of it as being the next Dirty Projectors album.

"I started out just making beats, creating these rhythmic grids and patterns on the computer," Longstreth continues. "That felt good, because it was just meditative, and not even overtly expressive. It was a way to spend time, making different rhythms. Then, on the other end of it, I was making string quartet music, old-style, writing [scores] out, for this weird, one-off solo show I did at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York [in 2013]. When I started to realise the rhythms and the string music were the same, that they overlapped and belonged to each other, then I started to wonder about how it might all fit together."

Befitting Longstreth's ever-adventurous approach to composition, Dirty Projectors is built on distorted rhythms, with vocal layers (including some from Tyondai Braxton), hand percussion, digital noise and field recordings all in the mix. The album is also notable for the way it treats Longstreth's voice as a raw tool, the songs both stretching his range, as singer, and pulling his vocals this way and that through pitch-shifting, "the modulation of the voices" amplifying the contradiction and confusion of the wounded lyrics.

"It felt like a form of reflection, and self-reflection, to take your own voice and manipulate or destroy it or tweak it," says Longstreth. "The overt technological tweaking is one aspect of the vocal character of the record. And the other is just me singing sad songs. I lived with these songs for a long time, sang them a lot before putting them on the record. A melody is like a path, and I took myself down the path a lot.

"On early Projectors records," Longstreth says, his vocals were "some of the last stuff [he'd] throw down". This time, they were at the centre of many compositions; befitting the lyrical quality, and the reinvention of a constantly reinvented project. Even before the album came to be defined by its sadness — its updating of a relationship status — Longstreth had yearned to change things up. "My experience of the last two or three records [Rise Above, 2009's Bitte Orca, and Swing Lo Magellan] is how much of a bubble you live in, where the music that comes out of your head becomes your reality. You spend all this time making it, spend all your time touring on it, and this goes on in a cycle. For me, it felt really important to get myself out of that, and live for a little bit."

That 'living' included a host of collaborations with others, Longstreth working with musicians ranging from Kanye West to Bombino. "I was ready to relate to music in a different way," he continues, "and to work not just on music with other people, but as a collaborator for other people. I had never really done that before. Working with all the people that I have, all those things were tremendous for me. Learning to hear music through the ears of people that I'm working with, and also just getting a chance to be a team player, it was really important to me, and to my growth. I think you can hear it in this record."

How can you hear it in Dirty Projectors? "It made me be a listener," Longstreth offers. "As a producer, it made me more practiced, more dexterous. Working with Solange, she has a musical idea that's pretty well formed, and she's looking for something for you. And you play her something, and she's like 'No, not that, more like this.' And there's this ongoing back and forth, where you're slowly drawing closer to finding this sound that she's chasing. And it draws you into a place you wouldn't go to yourself, helps you discover new ideas, and develop a new vocabulary. Each sound has its own shading, and people can interpret that in ways you wouldn't yourself. Different people can hear the same sound in different ways, because music is just so perceptional, so personal, so emotional."