Dirty Projectors

The Dirty Projectors began as a dormitory project by Yale freshman David Longstreth. Working on a four-track machine and a home computer, he recorded The Graceful Fallen Mango with various friends and released it under his own name in 2002. From the start Longstreth's music was based in pop, with XTC and Guided by Voices as obvious reference points, but with avant-garde touches in the sound and arrangements. He recorded at least ten more albums while at Yale, introducing the band name on 2003's The Glad Fact. As Longstreth became a full-time musician his work got more grandly conceptual: 2004's Slaves' Graves and Ballads and 2005's The Getty Address were both thematic pieces-the first recorded with a ten-piece chamber group; the second an alleged rock opera about Don Henley (though the hippie-esque Western ambiance is the only obvious link). 2007's Rise Above was another concept album, this time an interpretation of Black Flag's album with the songs re-arranged from memory-and apparently not remembered very clearly. The album introduced Amber Coffman as the band's co-singer, she also became Longstreth's romantic partner. Signing a bigger deal with the Domino label, the band made a national breakthrough with 2008's Bitte Orca, an album that had traces of modern pop and R&B along with the experimental elements. The critically-praised album led to some high-profile collaborations with David Byrne and Bjork joining the band onstage on different occasions (the Bjork collaboration became an EP, Mount Wittenberg Orca). Solange Knowles also covered one of the album's tracks, "Stillness is the Move." Longstreth took an uncharacteristic three years to complete the next album, Swing Lo Magellan, written during a country retreat in upstate New York. Preceded by the single "Gun Has No Trigger," it continued the move to a more accessible sound. In 2015 Longstreth contributed keyboards and additional production to the Paul McCartney/Rihanna/Kanye West single "FourFiveSeconds." After another long delay, 2017 brought the seventh, self-titled Dirty Projectors album. Clearly inspired by Longstreth's breakup with Coffman, the music was largely played by him alone.