Song Exploder - Dirty Projectors - Up in Hudson

Episode Date: March 21, 2017

Dave Longstreth started making music under the name Dirty Projectors in 2002, while he was in college. Since then, he’s released seven albums and collaborated with Bjork, Solange, and Kanye West, Paul McCartney, and Rihanna. And Dirty Projectors went from a solo project to a full-band, performing on TV, and at Carnegie Hall. Dave and one of his bandmates were in a relationship for much of that time, but then that relationship and the band broke up. In February 2017, with Dirty Projectors as solo project once again, Dave released a self-titled album, a breakup album, looking back on those years. In this episode, Dave breaks down the song "Up in Hudson," and the winding road he went down to create it. songexploder.net/dirty-projectors

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishi Kesh Hirway. Dave Longstreath started making music under the name Dirty Projectors in 2002 while he was in college. Since then, he's released seven albums and collaborated with Bjork, Solange, Kanye West, Paul McCartney, and Rihanna. And Dirty Projectors went from a solo project to a full band, performing on TV and at Carnegie Hall. Dave and one of his bandmates were in a relationship for much of that time. but then the relationship and the band broke up. In February 2017, with Dirty Projectors as a solo project once more,

Dave released a self-titled album, a breakup album looking back at those years. In this episode, Dave takes apart the song Up in Hudson, and the winding road he went down to create it. The story starts in 2013, after the last Dirty Projectors album with a full band came out. My name is Dave from Dirty Projectors. Sometimes when I finish an album, I'm like, all right, well, whatever that was, I want to try to do the exact opposite of that. I definitely felt that way after Swinglow Magellan.

For Swinglome Magellan, I had like hold up and written sitting with a guitar and hammering out, like, what's the second verse lyric? You know, three verses of lyrics and a chorus and a bridge. Last night old... And I wrote a whole ton of songs that way and then winnowed them down to 12 songs on the record. I knew I wasn't doing that this time. I wanted to make a sort of big break from the previous stuff that I've been working on, something that I didn't even recognize as being related to what came before.

I wanted to go back to what little I knew about electronic music and my weird homemade style of beat making. One of the first things that I tried to do in going back to this mindset of making beats was thinking about the Duali rhythm. The Diwali Rhythm is a beat by a Jamaican producer named Lanky. It was sampled by a lot of artists for songs that ended up becoming hits in 2002 and 2003. When I was in college, I had a job doing pizza delivery for Domino's.

I would, like, just drive around and listen to hip-hop radio, R&B. 2003, the Duoli Rhythm was like super popular. At that point, there's a bunch of songs, the Wayne Wonder song, No Letting Go. There's just this amazing, polyrhythmic clapping pattern with great melodies on top of it. That, to me, was like, super cool. But so flashing forward to 2013, feeling done with this kind of rock band zone,

I was like, oh yeah, there's this Diwali pattern. How did that go? And I tried to remake it, which I knew was wrong, but I was kind of like, whatever. Maybe this is going to be cool. That's the first thing that I came up with, and it came out of that. Like, can I remember how I remember how I was,

I used to think the Duali rhythm went. No chords, just a rhythmic grid. It felt like a hard thing to go from rhythm to adding notes on top of it that didn't feel stupid, or like wrong. It's like, oh, am I gonna put a major chord on there? That seems stupid. I was just bored of what I would come up with.

It was like a weird block. I had a practice base in Greenpoint. And my old friend, Ty and de Braxton, had a room in the building that the studio was in. We shared a wall, and I would literally just hear what he was working on at the time, blasting through this thin wall. The sounds that were coming through the wall were, like, crazy. They were amazing. And he was diving headlong into the world of modular synthesis at the time.

If you walked in my studio, you'd see, honestly, it's just like a bunch of, wires passed from one to the other. It looks kind of like rainbow spaghetti between all the different modules. My name is Taya Nda Braxton, and I'm a musician. Somehow we ended up cross-pollinating. I would feed a layer to him of the beat. And so even though this is just a dumb one-bar pattern,

he can just manipulate the sound. We threw the various layers through the modular gear. And lo and behold, the kick now had a tone. which became the basic harmonic foundation of what happened from there. I would just kind of like sing over the beat, just kind of freestyle. I found something that I thought I might like. I would just sing it into three-part harmony. And I do that because everything sounds better in three-part harmony.

So suddenly I had all this three-part harmony things, but I was having a difficult time figuring out what the underlying chords of it would be. And then I was like, oh, everything I write is always a melody that's starting here and ending up somewhere else. It's never four chords that repeat. And in like a functional music vocabulary, that's a bridge. So I've been writing bridges all my life and that's all I know how to do. But I was trying to think of like, well, what are different contexts? the form of that, this wandering thing, could make sense, could actually be a strength.

And it's like, well, you could tell a story. The story about the previous couple years, a little bit of what it felt like to be in a band and to be in a relationship, sort of like a Paul Thomas Anderson movie, but instead of like 30 years compressed into three hours, it would be like seven years compressed into seven minutes. The first time ever I saw your face. Laid my eyes on you. Was the Bowery ballroom stage?

You were shredding martial tubes. With this album, instead of using abstract concepts or language to get at real feelings, it's almost like the opposite of that, where it's using the language of really personal, vivid emotion to talk about these larger things. I knew. Maybe I could be with you. Do the things that lovers do. Slightly domesticate the truth.

And right, you, stillness is the move. Stillness is the move, which is the dirty projector's biggest song. I name check that song in the lyrics of the song. And it's one that, uh, um, no, see, I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to, to talk too much about the lyrics because I really do feel like there's been too much emphasis on the lyrics, you know, yeah, particularly like people taking them very on the face. And maybe this is a fantasy and it's not true at all, but I did feel like there's a certain amount of, it's not actually, it's not me, it's not anyone specific, this is just a story.

So I'm sure someone else lived this story, you know, being in a rock band in New York. Move to Brooklyn on your own. And join the band come on the road. Doing that for a couple years, going around the world, sleeping on floors and then playing bigger stages. This is how we saw the world side by side from the road and the stage. And then the band splits up and somebody moves upstate, somebody moves to L.A. I'm just up in Hudson.

bored and destructive, knowing that nothing lasts. So I just felt like this is not personal. This is my experience, but it's generic, you know. This is like a movie. I mean, also, it's important to say that the record was a long time. I made it, and over the course of a long time, it was, I'm in a very different spot in my life now than the stories that I'm telling in the album.

You know, I thought that I would feel more protected, knowing that I'm telling a fictionalized, old, outgrown version of a self that I may be inhabited in certain moments years ago, I thought that I would feel a separation from it. But the separation is not real to other people. And I wouldn't expect that it would be necessarily. You have to just listen to a song and take what you're getting from it. But it's been intense. Yeah, love's gonna rock, and love will just dissipate.

I came out to LA, and so did the amazing Brazilian percussionist Morrow Rafosco. Just as a performer, he's just like so crazy. You could throw a couple rocks off of a roof and have it go like, dood-do-do-do. And then he would go digging around in these boxes and just find like three little wood blocks and be able to just match it. He's crazy. He's crazy. So I had Morrow replay each different layer of the original beat,

and then I'd layer his performances over themselves, over elements of TIE's modular stuff. And the Duolie beat really felt like it was starting to get somewhere. It sounded super cool. I was still looking for that master key, that ostinato, that riff, the loop that ties the whole wandering character of the song together. You know, I'd been looking for that for like the entire time. And so I texted Ty and I was like, if you have any other ideas, I'm desperate, I need them.

If you want to just do some like real simple, rhythmic, repetitive stuff, that'd be awesome. I just imported like a rough sketch of the track that he gave me in. He told me the BPM. I was able to kind of like grid it out and then just kind of experiment with stuff in and around that B. and see what I can get to work. And he came back with something amazing. When you build a modular synthesizer, you build it, you know, module by module.

So it's all very personalized, and it's an instrument that's unique to you and what you want to get out of it. If you actually master the expressive nature of what a modular synth can do, you can make sounds that are real, because it's an analog instrument, but that sound completely out of this world,

something impossible that couldn't be real. It was kind of propulsive and percussive, but it also sat really well against his voice. And that was basically my dream and I dreamed it with you till we betrayed it. To me, that was the glue between the drums and all of the harmonic stuff, and not a moment too soon.

About a week before I was supposed to go to Miami to start to mix, I was like, at home making dinner, listening to Porgy and Bess, the Miles Davis, Gil Evans, Calabo. And I was thinking about how Miles is a storyteller and his voice is his horn. I love the way those are recorded, artificially close, very intimate, and often moving in these really close harmonies. So I was listening to those winds and the brass and everything. I was like, well, those are voices too. This is like a Greek chorus that's alternately sort of affirming. and responding more critically to what Miles is talking about.

And so that's where the idea of turning the three-part harmonies into a horn arrangement came from. Kanye was, he was an important spirit for me making this album. In the chorus, I was thinking about that kind of like Hudson Mohawk synth from Blood on the Leaves that's just so cutting and just fierce. The trombones and the choruses is like a mixture of bass trombone, trombone, and tuba. But then we actually had to dial it in a little bit. It was difficult to find that specific sound, that kind of zap on the trombone is like,

it's amazing when you hear it in a room. And I kept on being like, yeah, maybe zap even a little bit more. So I finally had the kind of like harmonic bed for the story that the main voice is telling. It felt like an epic, you know, and I was a little bit more. I wanted it to have a beginning and an ending. So there was the ending part, the guitar coda, which I made after Bowie died last year. It felt maybe like an elegy

and thinking about Bowie when I made it. And, you know, it goes on for a long time, like way too long, actually. And that feels like a metaphor for something. You know, life just keeps on churning forward long after whatever drama happened, like way in the past. Life keeps going and going and gets boring, becomes a new thing and gets interesting again,

and then that becomes boring. And now, here's Up in Hudson by Dirty Projectors in its entirety. Whenever I saw your face on you was the Bowery Ballroom Stage. You were shredding Marshall to get to know why don't you pack your clothes? The cold weed night was basically And I dreamed it with you.

Yeah, love's going to rock because love will burn up. Visit songexploader.net for a link to buy this song and to learn more about dirty projectors. I have a new album of my own coming out on April 24th. It's been about 15 years since I last put out of full ink. And this is the first one that'll be out under my own name, Rishikesh, her way. I started making Song Exploder when I was feeling lost in my own music career. And then for over a decade, I've gotten to have these incredible conversations about the process of making music, talking to other artists,

and it made me completely rethink my relationship to music and my way of writing songs. And this album is the product of all of that. It features contributions from some of my favorite artists, including some folks that you may have heard on this podcast, like Iron and Wine, Kevin Morby, Vagabon, Fenlily, and the producer Phil Wine Rope. I'm going to be on tour playing in cities across the U.S. starting in April,

and I'm trying to bring the spirit of the podcast with me. So every show that I'm playing, will begin with a conversation about the album with a different amazing guest moderator in each city, like Adam Scott, Samin Nasrat, Jason Manzuchas, Josh Molina, Minjin Lee, Ken Jennings, John Roderick, Austin Cleon, and more. They're all going to be my conversation partners on stage, and then I'll play with my band. The album is called In the Last Hour of Light, and the first couple songs are out now. You can listen to the music and get tickets for the shows on my website, Rishikash.com. or just go to songexploder.net slash live.

That's songexploder.net slash live. Thanks. Song Exploder is produced by me, along with Christian Coons, and as a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a curated network of extraordinary cutting-edge podcasts made possible by the Knight Foundation. Learn more at Radiotopia.fm. Next time on Song Exploder, Nora Jones.

You can find Song Exploder on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram at Song Exploder, and you can find all the past and future episodes of the show at SongExploder.net or wherever you download podcasts. My name is Rishi Kesheh Hereway. Thanks for listening.