Swinging High

Dave Longstreth has just taken a tentative step towards the world of filmmaking. The longtime leader and sole creative force behind Dirty Projectors —the Brooklyn-based band he began in his dorm-room when but a miscreant undergrad at Yale— has just undertaken his most ambitious undertaking: a 20-minute short film that functions as long-form music video for the seventh DPs LP, Swing Lo Magellan.

With its merry evocations of the stoner '70s-cinema surrealism of Jodorowsky and Herzog, Hi Custodian has a genuine cinematic élan, and a sense of visual ambition in keeping with Longstreth's often-conceptual approach to music. It's a forceful enough piece of video to shift perception on the album in question; given that, unto itself, Swing Lo Magellan is the least outwardly-ambitious Dirty Projectors album since Longstreth's salad days.

Hi Custodian in full

“In the past, I've always been motivated by an overarching theme, be it a narrative or the kernel of an idea,” Longstreth admits. Thus, 2005's The Getty Address was a “glitch opera” about “a teenaged Don Henley moving through a dreamland America”, 2007's breakout Rise Above involved “remaking a Black Flag album from memory”, and 2010's collaboration with Björk was a sustained suite of contrapuntal vocal pieces “telling a story about [Dirty Projectors' guitarist/vocalist and Longstreth love-interest] Amber [Coffman] and a pod of whales.”

“But this one isn't like that,” Longstreth says, of Swing Lo Magellan. Pray, tell, then, if there's no concept, what is the album's identity? “This music is about the song,” the 30-year-old answers. “It's about taking the simplest possible tools —the tools that everyone has, that everyone uses— and using the rules. It's about not disobeying the rules, like I usually do. And seeing if I can say something that feels irreducibly personal even whilst it's simple. That's true in its simplicity, but also not completely fucking stupid."

Thus, Swing Lo Magellan features, as its most telling thematic (or non-thematic, as the case may be) moment: a Beatlesy piano-ballad, and simple, straightforward love-song, sung from Longstreth to Coffman, called Impregnable Question (the refrain: “I need you/and you're always on my mind”). “It's rare to write a song like that. Well, for me, anyway," Longstreth smiles. “I thought that it was something that was very, very tender, this thing that could almost disappear through your fingers, until it was almost nothing. I waited around for the lyrics for it —it seemed hard to write them, and I didn't want to try too hard because I didn't want them to feel forced— and they came together really quickly one night. It's a very tender song. It's a really personal song... The only time I've ever sung that song, Impregnable Question, in my life was that one time, when we were recording it. That's what that song is. It's not something hardened by constant performances. It's delicate. It definitely has this delicate, gauzy, sobby quality.”

Longstreth penned the song in 2010, in Mexico, on break between festivals; the Dirty Projectors' itinerary having changed, with their swelling popularity in the wake of Bitte Orca, to a host of big summer festival dates with gaps in between. That swift rise, that breakout, came, in large part, to the one of the first Dirty Projectors songs not to feature Longstreth's distinctive yowling, mercurial croon, Stillness Is The Move. Instead, Coffman put in a starmaking turn on a tune taking influence from West African guitar-pop, Mariah Carey, and Wim Wenders' filmography; one which would, eventually, be covered by Solange Knowles.

All that was a long way from the rural fishing village in Mexico that Longstreth retreated to, mid 2010, to get away from the grind. Dirty Projectors were never going to be a proper band; Longstreth had delighted, across their first four albums, in changing musicians every time, in recruiting backing bands to play solitary shows or one-off tours. Those who did time in his live band included the members of Vampire Weekend and Ra Ra Riot played in Longstreth's band, who were but pre-fame Ivy League kids when they fell into Longstreth's charge. It was only with Rise Above that a line-up —Longstreth, Coffman, bassist/vocalist Angel Deradoorian, drummer Brian McOmber— cohered; and, then, spent five years on the road, before and after Bitte Orca.

“Bitte Orca was very much an attempt to create an emblem of the touring band that we had become, through two-and-a-half years of constant touring; almost this caricature of us as a live-band,” Longstreth offers, on the album. As for all that came after it, he found himself learning lessons as he played the album's heady songs live.

“When you go on tour for an album for two years, you come away with the feeling that, if you're ever going to do that again, you want to completely possess the material that you give your life to representing on stage,” Longstreth explains. “Other albums I've made have been idea-driven; that was always the goal of it, to use this intense, visceral approach and at the same time have it be very cerebral, and have this intellectual intensity. Most of my stuff is intoxicated by ideas, but playing the same songs over and over for two years, you come to the realisation that the best music goes so much deeper than any idea the bozo who wrote it had.”

Thus, the ideas man turned the fate of his next album over to that most nebulous, ephemeral, inexplicable of qualities: the Vibe. "It's a vulnerable position to let go of yourself, to let go of the things that you identify as yourself, as an individual, and as an artist,” Longstreth says. “To let go of that and be willing to just hand your fate over to this weird, amorphous energy, it's a weird, vulnerable, tender, dangerous, volatile energy to submit to. It's crazy. Crazy!”

Such craziness has resulted, with Swing Lo Magellan, in another album-of-the-year contender, with enough compositional dissonance and sly experimentalism to satisfy eggheads, but more heart than Longstreth's ever wielded before. Where, previously, he used to reinvent the music from album to album, here he's reinvented the sentiment.

“This feels like the most radical departure that I've made,” Longstreth says. “And it's a departure of substance, not a flashy one. Because simplicity is the hardest thing. The hardest thing ever. It's easy to get on some weird shit, to go out into this totally abstract territory that doesn't have any meaning at all attached to it, but that's a modernist project. And there's no energy in modernism, anymore; those ideas were radical in another time, but now, at this moment, that just doesn't feel real. It's not real. It's way more daring to just try to do something simple. That's what this record was for me. And that's why it felt like the most radical departure. Because, for me, to make it, it involved trying to forget pretty much everything that I had ever done, that Dirty Projectors has defined itself as being about. It felt like trying to find a whole new way to make music."