WRITERS' BLOC #1 (slight return) — your questions answered
+ lil' acoustic vid of 'circled in purple' from the song of the earth
hi friends,
thank you again for your questions in response to the first WRITERS' BLOC a few weeks ago. i wrote replies in the chat last week. now, maybe this is just an old man yelling at fast trains, but i felt like the user interface of the substack chat is … not so good? frankly, maybe a little cumbersome? (agree — or is my silverback millenialhood showing?)
so today i wanted to highlight a few of those questions & responses here.
before we dive in…
Song of the Earth comes out in three weeks — april 4th!
you can preorder it or stream the singles or even pre-save the album
also. we made these accordian-fold librettos, in a limited edition of 500, signed and hand-numbered by yours truly:
this week only, if you upgrade your subscription to the ‘zealot’ tier of this substack ($65/yr), we'll send you one in the literal, physical mail — with a personal, handwritten message of appreciation from me.
is this wildly cheesy? to me, it’s a way of creating a performance, between us, of the fact that dirty projectors is here because of you, and i am so grateful for it.
imperfect sound forever ….
here's a quick vid of the new song 'circled in purple' with the guitar on which it was wrote. crazy how what sounds a little joão one way can sound so igor another. to me, the endless plasticity of music is fascinating and affirming.
& without further ado:
WRITERS’ BLOC #1 — questions, answered
kayla asked a question about an idea that she'd heard that "creativity peaks in youth".
kayla, it sounds like you feel burdened with an unhelpful myth! i hereby give you permission to slough it off and KNOW that that myth doesn't have anything to do with your life. everyone is different. everyone has their own arc. personally, the last four years have been just about the most creative/productive i've ever felt.
i find emotional & intellectual openness, a footing of playfulness and surprise toward the unfolding day -- and, not for nothing, some feeling of material desperation (ie fear of being completely broke) -- are conducive to good creative flow. when you're in your teens and twenties, you may come by those conditions quite incidentally. but it's not the only way. for me, becoming a dad has created a perfect storm!
whatever the conditions of creativity are for you -- i have to stress -- it's your life. don't let some random secondhand gossip affect what you want to do. go out and do it! but, do so with some grace and kindness to yourself: making songs / words / drawings / etc is hard! you're bringing a thing into existence that was not here before. every step is fraught with uncertainty; that's just how it is (and actually a big part of the fun).
if you've got this age myth flicking your earlobe every time you're trying to listen to your inner voice -- "gosh, i don't know what chord to go to next; i'm too old; if only i were young and impetuous; then i would've just made a choice and gotten on with it!" or whatever -- you'll drive yourself nuts. everyone has some kind of inner hater like this. it's a natural response to the uncertainty involved in posing questions that have no answers. your inner hater is formulating itself as a myth about age. but it truly has nothing to do with the work you're making, and you can feel free to let it go.
todd grogan asked a question about songwriting, balancing intuition with an awareness of theory:
todd! theory/scales/etc are the least important thing in the moment. when i'm writing a song, i almost never know (or at least think about) what key i'm in. it's just not useful. not knowing helps you fumble your way by ear. when i'm letting my ear lead me, i’ll often end up make extremely classic (rule-abiding, time-honored, predictable) moves. but often, i won't have gotten there "in an awful way" -- to quote the 3-2-1 resolution of the sam cooke song you mention -- ie in a boring, obvious fashion. the ear knows what it likes! and it likes to be entertained. so follow it :)) hope that helps
nature is very important to me. nothing returns me to myself like a walk in the forest or a big ocean swim. the feeling of awe i can get observing patterns in nature is about the closest it gets to religion for me.
writing about natural places or experiences -- and the inverse, writing about the destruction of the natural world -- has always been immediate for me. (& by the way, when i've said that lyrics come last, i don't mean to imply they're unimportant; i usually just sort of need the music to tell me what i'm singing about first).
it's funny, the second part of your question -- do i think conversations about climate are missing in conversations about my songs -- is not a question i would have thought to ask before this album. in part that's because, like, making 'cannibal resource,' my goal was just to write cool-sounding nonsense that went with the music. i wasn't trying to write a veiled critique of extractive capitalism; i was just putting words together that didn't suck. it's only after the fact that it's become clearer to me how those images seem to be working.
i believe most of us have a deep, intuitive sense of the impossibility and unsustainability of the way humans are living on the planet. it goes mostly unacknowledged, but i'm starting to suspect it might just be the feeling-behind-the-feeling of a lot of songs & movies & poems & advertising & books in the last 30-40 years. squint and tilt your head a certain way and it’s like, wow, most of our 21st century cave paintings are stories about our dysfunctional relationship with the planet. there's a wide tonal range -- angst & regret or denial & rage or bargaining & fantasy -- but it's there, often with a haunted premonition of how, eventually, the earth will strike at us for what we've done.
these climate allegories are everywhere, right in front of our nose. but most of our climate feelings are still submerged right now. we're entrained not to notice or think about how our day-to-day consumption actually affects our world over time. but at some level, we all know.
tommy capybara asked about what i've been listening to lately.
i said errol garner, patrick shiroishi, ella fitzgerald, atahualpa yupanqui, bridget st. john, the hollies …
but before i got a chance to respond, josh cooper had pointed him to my recent 'nonesuch selects' video :
nick wright asked a question about the swing lo magellan song 'irresponsible tune'
that one came out of my experience spending a few months quite alone in rural andes, NY in 2011, writing & recording as many songs as i could. as i unplugged from the minute-to-minute rhythm of the world, i started to feel connected in a different way.
before the last two or so years, i/we rarely played this song live. (might have played it at carnegie hall in 2013?) recently, i've been closing some of tba-dlo and solo shows with it. i opened our encore at disney hall last year with it.
the song feels like a pair of pants that fits better now than when i first got 'em. i love irresponsible tune.
sam dorrance asked a question about my habit of cutting up recordings of chamber music, from the 2005 album the getty address to now, on song of the earth:
sam! when i was making the getty address, i was in thrall of the surreality of digital sound. i found it so liberating and revelatory to, for example, place the natural reverb decay of a wind quintet in a stone church right up against a second of pure digital silence ("not having found") or to loop a strange hiccup in a saxophone until it took on a sort of surreal, monstrous character totally outside its acoustic source ("jolly jolly jolly ego").
in hindsight, with the getty address, i was exploring the dynamics of digital space. dematerialization. i was working with sound, but it felt like a metaphor for what was then the relatively new experience of life online. digital experience.
other people were doing similar stuff. there's a ryoji ikeda album where he demolishes an alfred schnittke string quartet through glitch -- very broken but very beautiful and also weirdly funny. j dilla created a whole new rhythmic paradigm by layering different time-feels on top of each other in digital space. (dan chernas's book about j dilla is a must-read).
this might be a little grand (if so forgive me) but: in the same way that the first generation of psychedelic rockers were translating, say, the experience of an LSD trip into music in 1966-1968, i think there's a body of music from the late 90s / early 2000s that was responsive to this new form of human consciousness, putting into music what it felt like to exist online, at the dawn of that era. to me, the getty address is on the tail end of it, but belongs in the group.
what i was really keyed into and excited by was the feeling of transcendence: sound becoming pure abstraction. the realization that everything is a sample. creating an illusion of depth & space, and then smashing it into a 2-d cartoon of itself. the implication that everything can be liberated from its context, free to meet without friction or prejudice in the limitless blue-sky grid of cyberspace (or the daw) . . . that felt like a very fresh idea, an intoxicating one, in 2003-2004.
now, of course, this is just the world we live in -- musically, socially, culturally. unlimited, entirely fluid; also flattened, ahistorical, context-free. so glitch is less interesting. to make music that pushes digital unreality in the listener's face feels increasingly like pointing to a banal, depressingly obvious fact of life.
i still like sharp juxtapositions and a collage sensibility. but these days i seem to respond more emotionally when these types of moves are actually performed by musicians. and that's what we've done on song of the earth.
hi diego! i'm excited about brian's school of song class, but i've only had a chance to listen to lecture 1 so far. for me, there's usually gotta be some magic or kismet to be resurfacing old things. (it's more fun to go hunting in the future than in the past).
one example of kismet/magic is: one afternoon in 2011, i made a quiet, gentle lullaby type song. i was surprised: i didn't know where it'd come from. i loved the melody & chords, but ... it didn't make sense for me at the time? i had no one to sing a lullaby to. i was trying to write songs that a six-piece band could play in rock clubs and at festivals. so i made a little recording and forgot about it.
smash cut a decade: i have a newborn daughter and i want to sing her lullabies all the time. from recesses of memory, that old song floated up. singing it to my daughter, words took shape; it became 'blue of dreaming,' which closes song of the earth.
magic! the other side of the coin, though, is that sometimes songs aren't 'old' -- they're just developmentally slow. some songs are done in two days; some take ten years. a lot of the swing lo-era stuff that made it into the 5 EPs was in this category. it was heartbreaking for me to let go of those songs at the time. but i needed to put them down before they could be finished up.
that's what i took away from what eno was saying: the sense of his archive as this biomass, a chaotic soup of potential and possibility; nothing old or new per se, but just various colors and shapes all at once.
and … sometimes songs keep growing after they're ostensibly 'done.'
closing thought for the week ...
i find it hard to engage with the moment-to-moment of american politics right now. but this latest announcement of the EPA going full ministry of truth is so upsetting. today i’m thinking about the famous earthrise photograph, taken on christmas eve 1968 — the first photograph of Earth taken from the moon by a human.
this photograph changed human consciousness. within 2.5 years, marvin released 'mercy me (the ecology)'. joni released 'big yellow taxi,' with the indelible line
don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone? they paved paradise, put up a parking lot
... and richard m nixon signed an executive order creating the EPA. in his address to congress, he said:
"The great question of the seventies is: Shall we surrender to our surroundings, or shall we make our peace with nature and begin to make reparations for the damage we have done to our air, to our land, and to our water? ...
Clean air, clean water, open spaces—these should once again be the birthright of every American. If we act now, they can be."
can’t believe i’m quoting nixon, but — if we act now.
we must do what’s within our power.
yours,
d
Wish I had held off on my subscription for the incentive (jk). I always love hearing about how The Getty Address was made, especially after attending the Disney Hall performance and hearing it translated back into a live orchestral setting.