A Quote by David Longstreth

It's helpful to just hear things through friends' ears, people who know you well. I guess when I started Dirty Projectors, when I was, like, 20, I always imagined it would be kind of like an amphibious vehicle: something that could go with me wherever I need to go. That kind of constant change has been in the DNA from the beginning.
Well people love to go dirty and stuff like that. It's funny, because even really dirty things can kind of inspire, but all things inspire really dirty improv and monologues. So then really dirty things can inspire the exact opposite. It's kind of a crapshoot.
I've always been surprised when a straight guy likes me. It's just been like my whole life has been kinda like that. I definitely felt like when I started writing music, it wasn't writing for a gay audience at all. I was just writing for me. But what I say whenever I get this question is my best friends have always been gay, I've always been, as a person, just accepted by the gay community, and celebrated and had the best nights of my life at gay clubs. Always had a fashion sense usually with drag and I don't know. That's just kind of my people. That's just kind of where I fit in.
A lot of people say if they could go back in time they would not change anything. But, to be honest with you, I like it and I don't like it. I like the fact that all I went through as a youngster made me a great man, but just goin' through what I went through - I wouldn't wanna go through that again. I wouldn't wish that on nobody.
There was things just like not being able to date or - I'm talking like 15, 16 - like just certain things that my friends started to do. Like, they started to get phone calls from girls or like, you know, go and hang out 10, 11 at night, kind of going to the movies. There were just certain things that - it's not that I couldn't do all of those things. It's just that every choice was really deliberate and conscious and thought out and sort of balanced against the religion in a way where I felt - I wasn't necessarily trying to convert at 12 like [my mother] was.
If I could've picked a birthday it would've been on Halloween. Yeah, it's always been my favorite holiday. Not because it was my birthday, but actually because, I think it was the freedom, you know? When you were a little kid, you got to go out and be an adult for a couple of hours. You got to, like, just go out with your friends and knock on peoples' doors and be nuts and pull pranks and stuff like that. You could be whoever you wanted to be, you know, I guess that was the appeal to it.
Well, wherever you go, whatever you do, you're still you. You can change your surroundings, start a new life, but you'll always fall into the same old patterns, make the same kind of friends, commit the same mistakes. The thing you need to change is yourself.
I don't think I think things through like regular people would. I could be a real hateful person, and I also don't really care about my own well-being, I guess. I just kind of have that knack about me. I just don't care.
Probably the biggest mistake that I made personally is I knew early on that I wanted to go into start-ups and creating kind of software that could help change the lives of millions of people. And basically what I did is I kind of went, okay, well, I need a set of titles and I need a checklist of skills, and I ran through all that, and that wasn't a useless thing, but what I didn't realize, and, you know, and no one gave me the right advice for doing this, is that actually your network, in essentially, is your career.
For me, I need to listen to music in the morning, and after, it's kind of like a shower, you know what I mean? It's kind of getting rid of everything. I always play music after I act. It's not a conscious thing, like, 'Oh finally, I need to do this,' it's kind of a constant need.
That's kind of my job in the writer's room. I'm always the guy going, like, 'People wouldn't say that there. They wouldn't say that.' Like, I hate when I watch sitcoms and something crazy happens, and people just kind of go, 'Huh?' and then they just go on.
I was not so sure, but Jem told me I was being a girl, that girls always imagined things, that’s why other people hated them so, and if I started behaving like one I could just go off and find some to play with.
It's not hard for me to be honest with my fans because that's what I set out to do from the beginning - I've based my entire career off of just trying to do that for them - but I always kind of forget that my real life friends can hear my music and they can watch my interviews if they want and that's when I get kind of like- "oh..." - I don't necessarily sit down and talk to my friends about all the things that I write my music about, because it's easier for me to write music than to sit and talk to my friends about it sometimes- it's almost like writing in a diary.
Wherever I go - like, I go to elementary schools, I go to middle schools - wherever it is, if it's in Florida, if it's up in New England, I just feel like wherever I am, the kids always go crazy whenever they see me.
The good reviews that people have told me about through the years haven't really helped me do my job. So it's kind of like, if your hair turns out right you want to go out, you don't just want to stay in and look in the mirror. That's kind of what reading a review is like to me; it's like reveling in something that's just one night.
All of my friends are really good dancers, which was initially why I never danced - we'd go out and they would kill it and I'd be like, "Yeah, I'm just gonna sit at the bar." I broke my foot, and I couldn't run for a year, but I realized I could kind of dance. It reminded me how amazing dance is; it's so in tune with music - it is music. It's a physical expression of whatever music is. On stage, you're interacting with things - physical things. So I've really started to like and notice the way people move with music.
There’s a reason why players that have multiple championships have multiple championships. There’s a certain characteristic and an understanding and knowledge and that’s not something that’s easily taught. You kind of have to go through it and it kind of has to be part of your DNA from the beginning.
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