I made, like, five records as Dirty Projectors before I got out of college. And then I put a band together when I got interested in going on tour around that time.

I like the idea that songs can communicate in a way no other media can. That’s why I write them.

Fame can amplify the message of art in a remarkable, meaningful way.

What appeals to me about ‘Blind Willie’ is just how sparse that music is. Just this idea – the grain of it, the rawness of it and the simplicity of it. The directness of the language.

A song isn’t a newspaper. It might feel direct, but it’s not.

I used to feel that musical knowledge and emotional truth-telling were antagonistic. But I was too curious about chords and instruments and recording to stay locked in that mentality.

The thing that transforms something from being an idea to being a physical reality is work.

Steely Dan is a band I’m not that into. Well, I guess I like certain singles.

Sometimes when you‘re on tour, it feels like you‘re living the same day over and over again.

Being in a band can be really toxic to being in a relationship, considering all the touring and everything. Sometimes when you’re on tour, it feels like you’re living the same day over and over again.

A few things I’ve noticed about myself as a listener, and the music that I relate to and the music that’s continued to mean something to me since I was a little kid or a teenager, is that they’re songs that tell stories and songs that come from a place of experience.

I love that, for Kanye [West], there’s no difference between the epic and the personal. That makes him sound like a really grandiose douche – which, I don’t think anyone, himself included, could contest – but at the same time, it’s really amazing. I love the scope of his perfectionism.

I remember when I first saw ‘Guided by Voices‘; those earlier recordings are so deconstructed, kind of like four-track music, and so artful in their collage and in their weird fragility.

When I would go over to friends‘ houses, and they would be zoning out to Mario Brothers, I just found it the most distasteful thing.

Every Dirty Projectors album is a world unto itself.

I think, for Solange, it was important to make a super-strong direct statement with ‘A Seat at the Table,’ and she thought ‘Cool Your Heart‘ was kind of a summer jam that didn’t really fit.

What genres are good for is being like, ‘Here are the parameters. Here’s something about the way it’s going to make you feel. And here‘s something about the subject matter.’

The first musical stuff I worked on was after the tour for ‘Swing Lo Magellan‘ had ended and I didn’t really know what else to do. I didn’t know what music I would write. I just did work for other people – arranging, producing, writing – and all of that seemed to be in L.A.

I do feel like the hardest thing is to do something simple and tap into whatever remains of our common language rather than cultivating your own willfully esoteric vocabulary.

You think about, like, [20th-century classical composers] Alban Berg, Schoenberg, and Webern sitting around in some living room in Vienna and being like, “We are the end of music. We are the end of this tradition. Music is done.”

I loved ‘Nothing Was the Same’ so much. For me, that was the first Drake record that I got into.

The idea of letting a recording be a moment in time appealed to me. With digital recording, it’s easy to create a perfect text of whatever song you have.

At the end of the touring on Bitte, looking back on all that stuff, I feel really proud of having written that music and of us for having really played awesomely on those tours.

I was obsessed with what a song was and what the possibilities of language in a song are.

To be in the woods is a special thing. And also just the concept of wilderness as a necessary opposite in a kind of global dialectic. I want there to be wilderness where there are no humans in a world like this. So nature is super important.

I got a little baby grand piano off Craigslist for, like, $500. It’s a beautiful instrument that you hear on a bunch of the songs. That’s that piano on ‘Keep Your Name‘ and ‘Work Together‘ and ‘Little Bubble.’

A lot of my vocals were the first time I ever sang the song.

I do think that one of the best effects the Internet has had on music is that it’s allowed these false walls between different music communities to vaporize. We can see that this is a big, complex, interconnected web.

What music can do so well is tell the truth in a subjective way.

Making a movie really frees up the way you think.

I feel like the world is super different now than it was in 2009. And to get at something that’s somewhat darker, harsher, rougher, and a bit more challenging feels right.

There’s been no two Dirty Projectors records that have had the same cast of characters every time.

Dirty Projectors has always been a band that’s been card-carrying modernists in terms of pushing different kinds of abstraction to the fore and trying to take them to the center of the culture or something like that.

Sometimes you get really bitter about how the prettiest images don’t typically end up attached to the most interesting music. But I just take that as a challenge to try to do something cool.

When we’re talking about friendships, generosity and fairness and equanimity and sharing and all those things are super-important to me.

Bjork has this kind of abstraction and formalism that you associate with art music or avant-garde music.

Working as a producer, an arranger, and, in some cases, as a writer for some other people gave me a super different perspective.

The more songs I’ve written, the more I’ve grown interested in telling a story. When I first began, I had this list of opaque phrases where you can make of it what you want.

I just have these terrible memories of our first European tour back in 2007. We had hired this van and tour service from the former Czech Republic called Fluff Wheels, and they sent us out with this 19-year-old vegan driver kid who had no money and refused to eat anything.

I think certain people would be moved to be nostalgic about America‘s glory days, when the music set the tone for the cultural conversation and popular musicians had this absurd level of authority.

Ninety percent of touring is a logistical maneuver, moving your body and everyone else’s from one city to the next. You’re like a piece of gear. Then you jump out of the box, get onstage, and play. That sounds cynical, but it sucks to move around so much.

What Joanna and Solange and Kanye all had in common was a mental image of what the sound is supposed to be. As a collaborator, my goal has to be to help them get toward that mental image. That was cool.

Most of the creative industries have been deskilled by these really powerful ideologies of punk in music and Warhol in the visual arts. I think it would be great for us collectively to ask whether it’s had a negative or positive effect in contributing imaginative stuff to our culture.

You can have outlandish ideas, but if you don’t work at them, they just remain outlandish ideas. Anyone can have an idea. Work is transformative.