Lost And Sound

David Longstreth – Dirty Projectors

• Paul Hanford • Episode 166

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David Longstreth on Dirty Projectors, Orchestral Experimentation, and the Radical Psychedelia of Fatherhood

David Longstreth stands at a fascinating creative crossroads. For twenty years, he's been the driving force behind Dirty Projectors, crafting music that defies easy categorization while earning collaborations with icons like Björk, Rihanna, and Paul McCartney. Now, with his ambitious new orchestral song cycle "Song of the Earth," Longstreth explores our shifting relationship with nature while processing what he calls "the radical psychedelia of fatherhood."

Speaking from his California home studio (formerly a kitchen, before that a garage that "bloomed with mold"), Longstreth reveals how this project emerged from conversations with his longtime friend Andre de Ritter, conductor of the Berlin-based ensemble Stargaze. Drawing inspiration from Gustav Mahler's "Das Lied von der Erde," Longstreth initially set out to write nature poems, only to discover his feelings about the natural world had "gotten weird" – reflecting our collective anxiety about climate change.

The beauty of Longstreth's approach lies in his embrace of uncertainty. Throughout our conversation, he repeatedly describes putting himself in musical situations "beyond what I'm capable of," allowing the learning curve itself to become part of the creative process. This has been his method since recreating Black Flag's "Damaged" album from memory for Dirty Projectors‘ 2007 "Rise Above" (deliberately avoiding revisiting the original) through to this orchestral collaboration that marries environmental themes with deeply personal transformation.

Perhaps most captivating is Longstreth's description of how parenthood has fundamentally altered his perception. Watching his three-year-old daughter experience the world for the first time has made him question everything he knows, creating a profound sense of renewal that directly influences the emotional landscape of "Song of the Earth." Twenty years into his career, Longstreth has found a way to make music that feels simultaneously ambitious and intimate, political and personal – a rare achievement worth celebrating.

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Lost and Sound title music by Thomas Giddins


Speaker 1:

okay, so I'm speaking to you and I'm on a bench by um the canal in berlin, and it's a nice sort of almost spring-like sunny day, and so these are all the people you can do in the background, and I'm just going to talk to you a little bit about my excitement about today's episode. I've said it before, but one of the things I love about doing this podcast is that I get to have conversations with human beings whose music has had a real effect on my life. It happens a lot with Lost in Sound, and then I get to share the conversations with you, and today is one of these. David Longstruth from Dirty Projectors is someone who's made some of my favourite music of the last 20 years Honestly, the amount of times I've listened to Dirty Projectors. So when I got an email confirming that we were about to have a conversation, oh my God, I was so excited, and so I'm so excited to share this with you, to share this with you anyway, before we get going. Lost and sound is sponsored by audio technica, the global but family-run company to make the headphones that I'm wearing right now and who's mike you hear me do every interview through. They make studio quality yet affordable products because they believe that high quality audio should be accessible to all. So, wherever you are in the world, head on over to audio technicacom to check out all of their range of stuff. Okay, roll title music.

Speaker 1:

Thank you, hello and welcome to episode 166 of Lost and Sound. I'm Paul Hanford, I'm your host, I'm an author, broadcaster and a lecturer, and if you're new here, lost and Sound is the weekly podcast where I chat with an artist who works outside the box, from global icons to trailblazing outsiders and emerging innovators. We talk music, creativity and life. Previous guests on the show have included Peaches, suzanne Chiani, jim O'Rourke, cozy, funny Tootie, mickey Blanco and Thurston Moore. And yeah, last week on the show. Thank you for your messages about the Igloo Ghost episode. I think that's probably the first time that I can think of that a guest on the show has come from the same small part of the world as me. Igloo Ghost and me both come from Dorset in South England, but today we're going a little bit further afield. We're going over to California.

Speaker 1:

This week's guest is someone whose work, I think, has bent the rules of songwriting and production in some of the most beautiful, strange and totally original ways over the past two decades. Yes, you know it, it's David Longstruth, the creative force behind Dirty Projectors, and I've been a fan since the mid-noughties and I've watched as David's music has shapeshifted from kind of lo-fi beginnings to intricate avant-garde masterpieces. He's collaborated with everyone from Björk to Rihanna, kanye and Paul fucking McCartney, while always sounding completely unmistakably himself of. That seems to be able to totally navigate a blurry space between avant-garde underground music and total credibility and stepping into the big world of like grammys slash billboards, slash the music industry in in big, big capital letters. Um, one of the significant points I think along the way of of his work is the 2009 album, bitter orca, which we didn't actually chat about. I had some questions potentially queued up to talk to david about, but we we went on our own path with this conversation. But bitter orca, I think, was a jumping on point where I felt like a lot of people got to hear about dirty projectors and I think it's an album that now I was listening back to it in preparation for talking with david and listening back to it and being juddered by all these memories. It came out in 2009 and it does feel like it perfectly encapsulates that zeitgeist of an era that this was a point where it was still possible for bands to develop and exist and tour and live as bands. Um, I mean, I know it's still possible now theoretically, but it's a lot harder now and it was also that sort of age of dare I say it, and please forgive me for for what I'm about to say but the the prime hipster era where I'd say bitter orcaca and maybe like the Beirut album and a few other albums, really sort of encapsulated something that I felt like I was definitely very caught up in at the time and, listening back, the album has aged incredibly well.

Speaker 1:

Anyway, we're having this new chat. We have this chat because he's got a new album Song of the Earth. It's an orchestral song cycle made with the Berlin-based orchestra Stargaze the actual credit for the artist's name for this album is Dirty Projectors, david Longstruth and Stargaze and it's a really, you know, orchestral pop music. It's very bold, it's very much them. At the same time, it delves into some very big environmental aspects which we get into. We also get into what he describes as the radical psychedelia of fatherhood and how that has affected his work. We get into a lot of things about that, the creative process and well, yeah, you're about to hear it in a minute or two.

Speaker 1:

But before we get going, just a little bit of housekeeping. Um, I'm super lucky with lost and sound to be sponsored by audio technica, but all of the work you hear the curation, the research, the interviewing, the editing, the putting it together, putting out is all done is a one-on-one person operation done by moi, and so your support means a great time. I don't ask for any money. Like this I might do at some point or other, but I don't have a patreon or anything like that at the moment. Um, but what I do do ask is if you really do enjoy the episodes, please do subscribe. If you haven't already, please give it a rating, a review on the platform of your choice. It really, really really does help, if nothing, just as a sort of like little nice one, paul, go on, go on, son nice one anyway. Yes, uh, every listen I'm super appreciative of anyway.

Speaker 1:

So back to the episode. So we had this chat. It was midday, early afternoon in California and it was evening time in Berlin, so there was a sort of difference between, like morning and evening going on, and I mean I so enjoyed having this chat. We had it on Monday, the 17th of March 2025. And this is what happened when I met David Longstreth 25. And this is what happened when I met David Longstreth Well it's great to speak to you today.

Speaker 2:

Where are you? Is this your kitchen? In a sense, it used to be a kitchen and I kind of turned it into a little bit of a writing room.

Speaker 1:

Excuse me no worries.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I've turned it into a writing room, a little bit of a studio in my house, just a place to work out of.

Speaker 1:

Nice, nice. So is this where much of the album was initially written, or is this more of a recent readaption of the house?

Speaker 2:

It's where. It's certainly where the album was worked on and I wrote the first version of it. In the garage of my house we have an old kind of 1930s model t little structure that I illegally, uh, converted into a writing room and then it flooded and bloomed with mold and I had to get out of there.

Speaker 1:

I guess some things aren't conducive to the. Despite what, like 18th and 17th century poets, might tell you about certain writing conditions, not everything's conducive when it comes to like mold.

Speaker 2:

Right, right, yeah this. This wasn't a benignly hallucinogenic mold. It was one that just sort of settled into the lungs and made me feel like I was dying of consumption right I mean so?

Speaker 1:

I mean, one of the things I always get from whenever a new work with your name attached comes out is a massive sort of creative ambition to it. Like I first got to know, dirty projectors through rise above. And of course, that was a reinterpretation of a black flag album that I believe you hadn't heard for 15 years the original album before doing it and I'd like to ask you maybe a bit about that in a little while. But now we've got some of the earth, an orchestral song cycle with the classical ensemble stargaze. I mean, is it a deliberate thing in your dna? Do you think, to challenge yourself, or is that just like what happens?

Speaker 2:

um, I think both, I think both. Yeah, I always seem to set these things up for myself that are uh kind of beyond what I'm capable of, um, certainly at the beginning, at the outset, you know, and so you know, yeah, maybe I'm trying to hopefully capture the learning curve of of getting there by the end of it. I just, yeah, I love that there's a sense of becoming, but there's a sense of uh, um, searching and striving, maybe, yeah and is there a sense of like?

Speaker 1:

because I know some artists as well feel that once they've mastered something like, maybe the, the source has dried up a little bit Like, do you feel it's important to throw yourself into things where you know? Maybe you are a little bit uncertain for that.

Speaker 2:

I think so. Yeah, I think I get bored quickly, and the idea of you know, once I've figured out what something is to just to stay there and do it again, I it doesn't appeal.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah, I mean, and with the with the album, I mean, um, how did it start to come about, like, did it start with an idea that you had, or did stargaze approach you, or what was like the process for?

Speaker 2:

that. Well, so the the, the conductor of stargaze. Sorry to interrupt. I feel like I cut you off at the end.

Speaker 1:

No, you didn't, you didn't. I naturally arrived at the end.

Speaker 2:

It's all good, okay okay, yeah, so the conductor of Stargaze and just to back up a little bit, stargaze is this Yabrolin-based chamber ensemble and they really approach chamber music and scored music almost like a rock band or something you know.

Speaker 2:

They bring this sort of like four lads from Liverpool energy, you know, figuring out the dynamics themselves, and I really think that even in all of the different projects they have, even when they're like interpreting Beethoven or something, you hear those individuals you know. So they're a really special group and the conductor is a guy named Andre de Ritter. He's the musical director and conductor and I've known Andre like for forever pretty much. I think that we met actually in Australia in 2012, when we were maybe 2010, when, when Dirty Projectors was playing the Sydney Opera House, he was, he was, he was there, and so we've been friends forever and we've just been talking about like, oh man, like I want to write a piece for you guys, and Andre being like oh, yes, yes, you must write a piece. You know, sorry, that's like a very bad impression of his voice.

Speaker 1:

That's okay. I live in Berlin and I do that kind of voice all of the time and then suddenly feel really bad.

Speaker 2:

Oh, yeah, I love that inflection that some German speakers bring to English, the kind of like the melody that they, that they put into english, I think is really cool me too.

Speaker 1:

I always do. It's always something. It's always something that's done out of like affection. For me is that sort of embrace of going wow, I love the way you do that.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah yeah, yeah, um, and so anyway, you know we had had this conversation and then so finally, during COVID, andre, you know, at one point rang me up and said hey, like I think we've got, you know we've talked to a bunch of different kind of commissioning institutions and we've got, we've got a commission together for you to write us a piece, commission together for you to write us a piece. And I was so excited and I did so I don't really remember like how I know that Andre and I talked back and forth about like what should the piece be? And I think the the only idea really that we ever discussed was this idea of it being somehow related to Gustav Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde, his Song of the Earth. And so, yeah, that's where the piece originally, that's the genesis of the piece.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I mean, you said that it's not a climate change opera. Um, I think it's quite a natural tendency and I certainly did to read like environmental concerns into it, particularly with the uninhabitable earth, which you've taken lyrics directly from david wallace wells's best seller. Um, on that, I mean what, what is your stand on that? Like, I mean, how, I mean, I, I realized that you know, when an artist does a piece of work, they shouldn't have to necessarily explain everything to some podcaster. But you know, I mean, like what, what was the sort of take on that? Like how much of it was about the environment and how much of it was just more of like a kind of a general theme?

Speaker 2:

yeah, yeah, no, I mean, it's a bit of like a this is not a pipe scenario, certainly uh, yeah, I, I agree broadly that, like an artist, uh, you know something, something's lost when you're, when you're translating, um, a song or an album piece of music into you know, know, it's inherently reductive because music is a whole communication to itself. Now, that being said, me saying it's not a climate change opera and then also having a song that's literally a word for word setting of this book called the Uninhabitable Earth Life After Warming, I think that it's fair to for you to ask, like, what's going on with that? So, yeah, I mean well, so here's, here's, it's, yeah, here's what happened. For me it's like, and it kind of goes back to dust, leave under aired, the, the mother piece, so the libretto, the words of that piece are drawn from kind of like contemporary translations of classical Chinese poetry, things that were new in, you know, central Europe or whatever, in the turn of the century 120 years, europe or whatever, in in in the 19, in the turn of the turn of the century 120 years ago or whatever. And so these, these translated poems are, they're buddhist, you know, and there's a real emphasis on the natural world, the sort ofical nature of reality and of life a leaf falling into the water and turning into, you know, silt at the bottom of the lake or whatever, this kind of thing.

Speaker 2:

And so, yeah, there's a lot of these observations of just small little gestures in nature and in the natural world, quietly observed, and for me and of course you know, for me it's in translation, so I'm like it wasn't there right on the surface of of the, of the relationship that I have with, with song of the earth. But yeah, and sort of in the same same vein, my first draft of this music, I had no idea what the words could be about, um, and so, you know, I sort of I looked to, to the libretto of the Mahler and it started to seem really wild to me that the sum of these quotidian observations about nature somehow added up to the song of the earth. You know, which is to me just such a world. It's a world-sized concept song and earth. And so I was like, okay, that's where I want to begin, you know, I want to begin writing nature poems. And what I found in trying to write about nature, you know trees and water and, excuse me and forests and mountains and rock and heat and these various things.

Speaker 2:

I felt like all of my, all of my feelings about these things had gotten weird okay um, and interrogating that I I fell backwards into oh, I, I'm writing about how the earth feels different and how the balance feels off, and so it was quite kind of accidental that this became one of the subjects of the piece. And then, you know, just with time because after that initial sort of blast of writing it for Stargaze and premiering it in Hamburg in 2021, I took a couple years to sort of figure out what was going on with this thing and what it was about. And in that space or in that time, I kind of emerged with like oh, it is about nature and it's about climate, and it's about a world out of balance, and within that I can raise the stakes in certain areas. And I found that David Wallace Wells thing, and so that's kind of how it. I just gave you a super long answer. Thank you for letting me ramble.

Speaker 1:

That was super fantastic and it's quite interesting that you were saying that you know a lot of the original ideas back 120 years ago kind of come from buddhism, because the kind it seems like the approach you took of letting things kind of like divine themselves and sort of just become more apparent I was quite a buddhist kind of approach themselves. Not that I know too much about buddhism, but that's kind of like the take I feel when it comes to conversations about like zen and buddh. That it's about like sitting with things. It seemed like you'd sat with it for some time and the things rose up.

Speaker 2:

That has never occurred to me and I really like it and it reminds me of the author, george Saunders.

Speaker 1:

I don't know Tell me author George Saunders.

Speaker 2:

I don't know, tell me, george, george Saunders is like an amazing, you know, american author, primarily of short stories. He also wrote a book called Lincoln and the Bardo and he also wrote a book that I read during during this period actually called something like A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. Sometimes I get the prepositions wrong, but that's essentially the title of the book and it's nonfiction. He's writing about the process of writing and, if I can sort of bastardize or just be so reductive about one of his methods or strategies, things that he recommends, he talks about how style, how individual style, comes out of essentially just what you're saying, sitting with what you've written, rereading it, maybe changing a word here this time, maybe changing the, the, the structure? Is this a comma here? Or maybe we're putting a period and having another short sentence, these small iterations over time, very long time.

Speaker 2:

he describes it as putting it, putting a piece of writing through the filter of your spirit or of your, your personality, and you know I hadn't thought to relate that idea to the fact that that saw that I know that George Saunders has spent part of his life as a Buddhist, so, wow, that must be there.

Speaker 1:

Right, okay, nice, nice, yeah, I mean, yeah.

Speaker 1:

Another thing that grabs me about it, particularly with the Uninhabitable Earth, paragraph one, and you sort of mentioned just now, about how, like certain elements of the music, you could raise up a little bit, certain things you could be more direct about. And, of course, because there's always like a kind of like a balance, like an orchestra itself, in how some things should be more subtle and some things should be more direct. And it occurred to me, if that song is like the, the lyrics or like the way you've taken, like the, the words from the book is so direct about the environment that it reminded me of like something that I feel has been missing from a lot of pop music for many, many decades now, about just like a removal of irony, like I think back to, like something like marvin gaye's what's going on, and like this sort of deliberateness of like this is an important thing we have to talk about. There's no, there's no irony here at all. This is it.

Speaker 1:

And do you think I mean, and you know, since you finished the album, you know there's been, you know I'm sorry to hear about the wildfires earlier in the, the year, you know, and also with, uh, the trump administration. Do you feel that these times call for a less arch approach, you know? Do you feel like this allows art to be more direct, in a way that perhaps we've been too cool for for a long time? You know, too ironic.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I mean, it's a great question. Um, I don't know, I guess I don't have a, have a, I don't have a prescription there about what you know, what songs or music or, or books or art should, should, do. Um, and you know, I mean, one thing that's just so amazing about music and paintings and movies is the way they can really, um, communicate very deeply about things that are, things that are going on in the world, um, things that we all feel and maybe we haven't articulated. And sometimes, yeah, what you're saying, to just make it that, to make a protest song, that just is what it says it is is very, very powerful. I think. It can be equally powerful when it stays subtext.

Speaker 2:

You know, I think it, I think, and I think it is no less powerful or useful or something in in staying subtext, you know. So, yeah, yeah, I mean, I think both, the only sort of like prescription that I would, you know, you think about having for myself or anybody else in this period, is just to try to keep to be real, to be honest and to be real and to be unafraid to be new, you know, and don't just try to you know, I don't know to settle into the sort of digital serfdom of you know, putting the stuff on the streaming services and trying to capture people's attention on the social media, and that, being a sort of closed loop of what your expression is, seems like a trap that we are all being invited to, to step into um yeah, yeah, I think it's.

Speaker 1:

There's a. Yeah, the, the, the algorithm and the presentness of it, um is, is very seductive. Um, I think, particularly giving us a, it can give us like a kind of a map, but the map is just basically a map's already written and yeah you know well.

Speaker 2:

So, to tie these two things together, I was just thinking about this the other day, you know, the, the, the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency here in America, just, you know, just announced its new mission, which is not around the protection of the environment but about the easing of cost of living for Americans. And it's, it's, you know, it's essentially full ministry of truth. You know, we get there. We get there, in this case, we get there to lowering the cost of living by rolling back the environmental protections of the last, you know, 50 years. And so, yeah, I was thinking about this moment around the creation of the EPA and I was thinking about, yeah, the capacity of art to change minds and to fill hearts, this Earthrise photograph taken from one of the NASA moon missions that's so famous.

Speaker 2:

I was just thinking about that, that photograph, and that photograph was very important to me in the making of Song of the Earth, and I was so I was like looking it up and like, within two years of this photograph coming out, you know, marvin gaye, who you just mentioned, sings mercy me, the ecology from what's going on. And there's the joni song about, you know, paving paradise and putting up a parking lot, yeah, and in that same stretch nixon creates the epa. Yeah, and just like the Earthrise is almost just the most powerful drug that just dosed humanity and created this true kind of moment of Earth consciousness, and I'm trying to think of what an analog could possibly be here in 2025. And I don't know, but to me that that's, that's an ideal.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah that's. I can't think of an analog right now, but I bet I do think of something, maybe in two nights time, at four in the morning, like you know, one of those points where you just wake up and you go, and it might not even be a very good one, it'll be a dream based one.

Speaker 2:

Well, I love that. If you do, let me know.

Speaker 1:

I definitely will and I wanted to kind of go back in time and ask you a few questions about, like you know, your formative years and and how music came into your life. So where did you grow up and what? What kind of music was around you when you, when you were, when you were really young?

Speaker 2:

yeah, I grew up in the middle of the state of Connecticut, which is to the north of of New York, and you know it's funny, you know with rise above it's kind of funny because I know now that there was, you know there were hardcore scenes in Connecticut in the mid-90s. But we grew up in this kind of rural town in the middle of the state and there was nothing going on. And so my brother and I have an older brother we had our parents' records at first and they were, you know, classic boomers and the Beatles and the Beach Boys were big in our house. You know Joni and Neil were big in our house, so that. And then, you know also, they listened to a lot of classical music, so that was around the house a lot they listened to a lot of classical music, so that was around the house a lot.

Speaker 1:

And was there a point where you fell into? I fell into it's like maybe a weird way to say it when where you started making music, where you where you felt like, okay, this is maybe. This is speaking to me as something that I can do myself yeah, yeah, for sure you, my brother.

Speaker 2:

My brother got into music and he had some friends who were kind of like hipping him to like first generation punk, you know, like Black Flag and the Ramones and like Dead Kennedys and Circle Jerks and stuff like that circle jerks and stuff like that and um.

Speaker 2:

And then at the same time you know, this is this at this point, this is, like, you know, early 90s he was getting pretty into nirvana and so he and my dad, as like a thing that like a parent and kid do together, had taken guitar lessons, maybe when he was five, you know a decade earlier or something, and neither of them had taken taken lessons, maybe when he was five, you know a decade earlier or something, and neither of them had taken to it, and they had both given it up in like six months.

Speaker 2:

But we had these guitars in a closet in the house and my brother got into Nevermind and like started writing songs with three chords, you know. And then me, being the little brother I was, was just like well, I, I want to do that too, and uh, and so my brother took the other guitar, the one that had been his when he was, you know, five or whatever, a little rakinto or not rakinto, but like sort of three-quarter size nylon string, and was kind enough to string it upside down for me and he taught me the riff, for come as you are, and it was a done deal.

Speaker 1:

I think it's similar with me. I mean different, but I think Nirvana was my first guitar experience. You know I, my mom, bought me an acoustic for Christmas and I felt like it was this kind of weird attachment with punk when, but not being around for punk when it happened and like interpreting it in different ways, like for me it was a refusal to tune the guitar ever, thinking that that made it punk, but it actually made it just impossible to play anything and yeah, you know, I do come as you are?

Speaker 1:

yeah, definitely yeah. And and, like you know, whilst we're on the subject of punk, you know, with Rise Above, you know, I mean that was my getting on point for Dirty Projectors, and you'd been around for a few years before then, and what was the idea in approaching something from memory that you hadn't heard for so long?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I just, you know, I think I liked the idea of getting it not quite right and I was. I think I liked the idea of, in a way, not having to write words, you know, or having my contribution to the words be like what I would get wrong, what I would misremember, you know. So I think that's where I was coming from did.

Speaker 1:

Was it ever tempting?

Speaker 2:

because I mean, I guess this was what 2007 um in yeah, wrote, wrote, we wrote, I wrote it in 2006 and then we went on tour in the late 2006 opening for a band called shushu yeah, and so was it.

Speaker 1:

Was it tempting to I mean because the internet was about was it tempting at all to ever go and just have like a sneaky listen back to, back to the original and go, oh yeah, that that's what that bit's like oh yeah, oh yeah.

Speaker 2:

But then I was also like that's the opposite of the point. And the internet you know, I wish we could go back there. You know, prior to the advent of the phones, it really didn't have the sort of like immediacy for one or the authority or the sort of like, I don't know, like self-evidence or something that it seems to have now, you know now, as a resource. Oh well, let's just check, let's just look it up, let's just check. It didn't quite. I felt that the space to create, to remake it wrong was, was, uh, was bigger than I might feel now.

Speaker 1:

You know yeah, I feel like I mean and I think this is a lot about the album to me as well that, but the idea and what you're saying there, that the idea of not being able to fact check, I mean we could have done that, but what that you said the presence of the smartphone wasn't so big. Um, like we do lose and I don't want to sound like a fuddy-duddy here, but we do lose something in the idea of storytelling and imagination, and that's what that album really captured to me is that you know that, that, almost that, that kind of you know that the, the bunch of people in a pub saying, oh, the fish was that big, oh, no, it was that big. And, yeah, you know the, the way stories can embellish, but not always, that's not always a bad thing. You know, um, they can embellish, but that's not always a bad thing.

Speaker 2:

They can embellish and they can also just take on the characteristics of who's telling it, who the audience is at a given moment. Yeah, totally, and I guess what you're saying reminds me of the other side of the Luddite thing. And, of course, yeah, I'm as a sort of like elder millennial, as they say. I lived almost a full life before the phones came up, and so I really clearly remember both ways of life. If you talk about the smartphone as analogous to the invention, the printing press, or if you think about conversations about generative AI as like saying, oh, it's going to be a shift akin to the invention of written language, you know, was it Socrates who was like, oh, storytelling has gone downhill since the advent of writing? And, like you know, yeah, people, people say like, oh, like people's.

Speaker 2:

You know, people's minds were wired up differently in terms of memory and storage because there was no way of externalizing knowledge, mmm, and I see it in my, I see it in my daughter, who is three years old.

Speaker 2:

She doesn't, you know, she doesn't know how to read. And if we listen to the soundtrack of Beauty and the Beast, the Disney movie Beauty and the Beast, the Disney movie Beauty and the Beast she's seen the movie once. But if we're in some random instrumental moment in the score, in the soundtrack, not like one of the songs, she can tell me what's going on. She can be like, oh, this is the scene where the Beast and Gaston are fighting on the roof, just from like the sound of like some little soltasto violins, like I'm so, she is a little bit in that sort of like socratic or whatever, that pre-writing mind, and it blows me away and that it also gives me a feeling of ownership of my luddite ism. So I'm like, yes, something will be lost when you don't remember anything, and we feel we need to appeal to this far from correct, far from objective body of knowledge in the cloud. Anyway, I'm rambling here.

Speaker 1:

That's fantastic. I can definitely relate to that and it's good to have something that you know. We just think no, I'm not just being a fuddy-duddy about that and you mentioned about your daughter. And something else about the album is. You mentioned, I think, in a quote somewhere, that the album was partly about being in touch with a sense of radical psychedelia of fatherhood. I might be misquoting that. Could you explain that to me?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, well, I think, a couple different components of that. Just the idea is the feeling of new parenthood being a psychedelic state. For me that resonates in a few ways. One you, literally, you don't sleep at all. You don't sleep at all, so your mind is just you're in an altered state. The executive function you know that that hardens up when you're in your 30s or whatever the neuroscientists tell us. That's just kind of gone, you know, gone to some degree.

Speaker 2:

But probably, more importantly, the experience of getting to see stuff through, through someone else's eyes, well, that in itself, this deep, sort of radical kind of empathy, you know, um, just by suddenly being, you know, apparent, yeah, outside of yourself in that way.

Speaker 2:

But the experience of seeing things new for the first time too, is just um, an invitation to, to question what you know, you know and it's not sorry, it's not intellectual or cerebral like that, for me it's just like, wait a minute, like I don't what, what do I know? Like, like what, uh, how can I? Yeah, I mean, how can I really respond to this in this moment? What do I, what do I see in the way that this person is really feeling this for the first time", and so, yeah, yeah, yeah, I think that there was a lot. It was a really you know it is, and also her newborn and sort of toddler eras were so, so inspiring. Just for that reason it's just like wow, um, this is all new, like I I feel uh, I feel uh, made made new by this oh, that's a.

Speaker 1:

That's a beautiful way of explaining it. I mean I'm only, uh um, a dad to a cat so far in my life, but you know, I see through that smaller example. I do see the world in a certain way. I didn't beforehand, just through the innocence, I guess. Yeah.

Speaker 2:

I really like that. The innocence, yeah, yeah, there's that. And then there's also just, you know, just being responsible for another thing too. That's that's, that's a big change.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah, definitely. And on, I mean, I guess, because, because you know you're into like the, the, the 20s now of your musical career, you know, and does that feel? You sort of did a bit of a gulp then I mean, does that, does that feel like, oh my God, yeah, or is is, you know, you very, very kind of conscious of like the journey?

Speaker 2:

Well, I mean, yeah, it's one of those things where, um, it seems it doesn't seem like it's been that long and then you think about, actually, you know, you go kind of year by year and you're like, oh, okay, it adds up.

Speaker 2:

You know, I will say, just connecting back to one of the various first things we talked about, the idea of, or just for whatever reason, um, my compulsion to uh continually put myself in like sort of new situations to just ask questions that I don't know how to deal with, uh, musically, has, has, has kept it sort of fresh for me and I think also that's feels like why I don't, um, it doesn't feel like it's been a super long time.

Speaker 2:

You know, um, it's just, uh, I don't think I could have and in a way, song of the earth is re, is most similar in the body of stuff that I've done, to an album that I made 20 years ago that came out, actually will have come out, 20. So song of the earth is coming out on April 4th 2025 and April 5th will be the 20 year anniversary of this album called the Getty address that I made. That also is sort of like orchestral in scope and broadly it's about the American landscape, and so there's a weird sort of circularity returning to the place and knowing it for the first time, kind of energy with Song of the Earth. But I guess what I was trying to say is I don't, yeah, I couldn't. I couldn't have gotten here without having, you know all these other, you know all the other places that I've stopped along the way.

Speaker 1:

I like that. Yeah, there's a sort of stepping stone. It's just a creative evolution, I guess you know, and I mean, I guess it's like we kind of sometimes think of like an artist, that sort of once they've done maybe a handful of albums and have been around for a certain amount of time, that it's there's a sense of deja vu, but then you could take the art out of it and just anything in life is just a series of going through years and doing different things, and so it's. I guess what you're doing is just applying it's like you know, applying it to the progression of your life yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, maybe.

Speaker 2:

So yeah, it's almost like a that, that method of agriculture, where you are leaving a few fields, uh, unplanted any given year so they can grow back yes, fallow, isn't that fallow they call it.

Speaker 1:

Give it a fallow year. I remember like glastonbury always has a fallow year every few years, oh yeah yeah, I like that david, thank you so much for chatting with me yeah, paul, that that was so.

Speaker 2:

That was. That was really fun to talk to you and I've been listening to um some episodes of the podcast in the car in the last week or so and I love the Alvin Nodo one.

Speaker 1:

Oh, thank you. Yeah, I was super excited about that actually, because it's like we were talking about earlier on, about the kind of the German, a certain kind of way of German speaking in English.

Speaker 2:

He excelled at that. Yes, yes, he truly did excel and yeah, that's, that's true. Um, and yeah, just his, his, his approach to um, to like glitch, the things that he was talking about. I loved um and it and it had me thinking too about the relationship of early electronic music and kind of like mid-century orchestral music oh right, in what way of modular synthesis and then apply them to the orchestra and I don't know. I was just, I was thinking about the, the, the, those, those webs, those webs of connection, yeah and just, and I felt, yeah, I felt glad that, yeah, I felt glad that Alvin Noto's out there like doing it. You know, um, that's his mission, and that that like, yeah, honestly, that your podcast is a place where, like, people are having these conversations thank you so much.

Speaker 1:

thank you, and I mean I've been loving your music for since I heard rise above. So it's a real honor to chat with you today and there's been many times in my life I've put on various pieces of music you've done like before going out, before you know cooking food, you know in the heart, you know when I've really wanted to kind of like feel something. You know I think dirty projectors have always made music that I've put on because I've really wanted to feel something and they've given me that. So thank you, oh man that's really cool.

Speaker 1:

Have a great one, cheers. Thank you All. Right, you too. Bye, paul, bye, bye. Okay, so that was me, paul Hamford, talking with David Longstriff, and we had that conversation on Monday, the 17th of March 2025. Thank you so much, david, for sharing your time and thoughts with me there.

Speaker 1:

The new Dirty Projectors David Longstruth and Stargaze album Song of the Earth is out now. Well worth checking out if you've not done already. Yeah. So if you like the show and you haven't already, please do give it a subscribe, give the show a rating and a review on the platform of your choice, and if you like what you hear of what I do, you can check out other things I do by checking out my radio documentary the man who Smuggled Punk Rock Across the Berlin Wall, by heading on over to the BBC Sounds app on the BBC World Service homepage. And my book Coming to Berlin is still available in all good bookshops or via the publisher's website.

Speaker 1:

Velocity press audio technica are the sponsors of lost and sound. Yes, the amazing headphones, turntables, cartridges and microphones company. They're global but still family run, and they make the headphones that I do every interview through. They make the microphones that I do every interview through. They make studio quality yet affordable products, because they believe that high quality audio should be accessible to all. So, wherever you are in the world, head on over to AudioTechnicacom to check out all of their range of stuff. Yes, tom Giddens, he's the person that does the music you hit the beginning of every episode and at the end of every episode of Lost in Sound. Thank you, thomas. There's a hyperlink if you want to check out more of his stuff in the podcast description, and so that's it. I hope you enjoyed listening today. I hope, whatever you're doing in this crazy fucked up world, you're keeping sane, keeping safe, looking after yourself, looking after your loved ones, taking care and having some nice coffee. All right, take care, bye, bye, nice coffee. All right, take care, bye, Thank you.