David Longstreth

I've always loved cuneiform; I've always loved the way it looks. I love that it's the world's oldest script. And the creative potential of bad translation or misunderstanding or something has always been at the core of the idea of 'Dirty Projectors.' So the cuneiform is pretty playful - basically, just a joke.

I've been good at creating new textures and new fabrics, like vocal hocketing, or interlocking guitars, or suggesting new ideas for style... that's what the band has really excelled at.

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.

I wasn't into chimpanzees or gorillas because I kinda felt like they were the Coke and Pepsi of the primate world.

People like to put music and art up against the dehumanizing character of commerce and business corporations.

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.

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

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 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.

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

I'm from the East Coast; I think about things dialectically sometimes - in other words, antagonistically. The rhythms that I think of are polyrhythmic, bouncy, loping. The way that I want to approach that is to get, like, a flat-footed Connecticut hard-core drummer to play these bouncy, loping polyrhythms.

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.

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.

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.

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

For somebody like Kanye, fame is the fullest realisation of his art in a way. It's like an Andy Warhol dream or something. He's able to marshal all of these different artforms and media into his story, in this very layered, idiosyncratic way.

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

When I first heard Bjork's music, I felt like I was a similar-minded thinker, both harmonically and melodically. She takes those things that you naturally assume to be opposite because they're presented that way most of the time, and the way she twines them together is so beautiful. To be able to do that is so powerful.

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

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.