Dirty Projectors

During the last quarter-century, dozens of people have entered and exited the ranks of Dirty Projectors, one of the world’s most distinctive rock bands; from Ezra Koenig and Tyondai Braxton to Jenn Wasner and Angel Deradoorian, one could field several teams of indie rock all-stars from the Projectors’ former ranks. But the flood of fascinating ideas and the singular sound that have continued to make Dirty Projectors so vital all stem from David Longstreth, the band’s founder and tireless creator. When Longstreth started his first band as a Connecticut teenager, there were 12-hour practice days, testaments to what he perceived in the possibility of music. He maintained that discipline at Yale and then when he started the Dirty Projectors, a band that became the arty and audacious linchpin of the post-millennial Brooklyn scene.

An operatic concept album kind of about Don Henley? A dauntless cover of Black Flag’s Damaged from memory? A lineup of four astounding singers who can swing from high and low with acrobatic precision, within the context of a rock band using lyrics that read like mystic texts? A massive song cycle about our current environmental calamity performed with a chamber group and inspired by Mahler, which sets a David Wallace-Wells passage to music? These are all ideas that Longstreth has delivered during one of indie rock’s most intriguing careers, alongside collaborations with Björk, David Byrne, Paul McCartney, Solange, and Joanna Newsom. As The New Yorker encapsulated in a 2025 profile, “Longstreth has a complicated harmonic language and an incredible ear for a hook. His work draws on jazz, folk, pop, classical, West African guitar music, and Slavic choral traditions: chaos on paper, but it works.” Having developed a set of piano songs in recent years at home in Los Angeles, he brings new work to Big Ears 2027.