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Dave Longstreth, the leader of Brooklyn rock sextet the Dirty Projectors, writes songs so catchy even his relatives can’t stop singing them.
Take “About To Die” — the second song on the Dirty Projectors’ “Swing Lo Magellan” album — the focal point of the band’s big homecoming show Friday night at Carnegie Hall. The song is about trying to communicate without skirting around an issue, but the title also sounds like it refers to a cellphone running out of battery life.
“I know,” says Longstreth with a laugh while eating a doughnut near his apartment in Greenpoint. (He’s lived there four years, having come to New York from northern California in 2005.)
“I noticed that the most common appearance of that phrase now is about the phone, and people often will do that to me now. We’re talking on the phone and my brother will be like, ‘Oh, dude, I’ve got to go because my phone is” — he sings the hook —“ ‘about to die.’ ” He laughs.
“And I’m like, ‘F - - k you!’ ”
He’s kidding, but his brother probably wasn’t. Nearly everything on “Swing Lo Magellan” lodges in your head eventually, and it’s the kind of album you keep hearing new things in with repeated plays. And although the band has long been a critic’s favorite, the fact that they’re playing Carnegie Hall suggests they’ve moved beyond mere cult status. “It’s amazing to be playing [there],” says Longstreth, 31.
“It’s crazy. A bunch of us saw Joanna Newsom play there I think in 2011 and it sounded so amazing. Amber [Coffman, Dirty Projectors singer and guitarist] and I looked at each other, and we were just like ‘Man, we should play here sometime.’ So it’s really cool that it’s happening.”
Longstreth is clearly not afraid to court a bigger audience. The first single from “Magellan,” the spooky “Gun Has No Trigger,” garnered a number of James Bond theme comparisons. This confused Longstreth at first. “It didn’t occur to me at all,” he says. “I resisted it for a while. I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ But it’s got this darkness — this kind of sexiness and theatricality — that I didn’t immediately hear. But then, when I watched ‘Skyfall,’ I turned around on it: ‘That would’ve been cool.’ ”
He found the Adele theme “pretty blasé — but she’s got such a gorgeous voice.”
Would Longstreth consider writing a real James Bond theme?
“Sure. Dirty Projectors has never really defined itself against that stuff. It’s a big universe that we operate in.”
Indeed, the group has grown poppier with age. “Magellan,” unlike most of previous Dirty Projectors albums, doesn’t have an overarching concept, a la the 2007 album “Rise Above,” in which Longstreth wrote new music to the lyrics for each song on Black Flag’s 1981 album “Damaged.” And while “Bitte Orca” (2009) was often powerful — Solange memorably covered its single, “Stillness Is the Move” — its frequent knottiness made it the opposite of a casual listen.
“I love that stuff,” says Longstreth.
“But what I got into with ‘Swing Lo Magellan’ was writing a song and not having it be tied to this much larger framework. It feels really freeing and amazing.”
It sounds looser — more musically inviting. So are the lyrics, which are the most straightforward and heartfelt Longstreth has written. “It turned out that doing the simplest things are the most challenging,” he says. “You have to be a little more confident to just come out and say what you’re feeling. It was a big year. People talking about how it was the end of the Mayan calendar — I can kind of feel it.”
Appropriately, Longstreth is planning a big homecoming. For the Carnegie show, the band will be performing with New York string ensemble yMusic (also the opening act) for a number of Dirty Projectors songs with strings in them — including, likely, about half of “Magellan.” “We’re going to go a bit deeper into the catalog and make a show that has the breadth of everything we’ve done so far, from more
a cappella stuff to the loud and rocking stuff [and] the more intricate acoustic stuff. I want to have it feel like a summary of everything we’ve done so far.”