Review of Dave Longstreth’s School of Song course
I recently completed a month-long songwriting course with the Dirty Projectors’ Dave Longstreth. Overall, it was a highly analytical perspective of tapping into the abstract and the unconscious during four distinct stages of starting, patterning, managing, and completing a song. I am sure I am a bit bias from being such a fan of Dave’s music, but this series really let me shed those bias’ and look at him in an untethered light. I write this critique because I am an asshole in search for truth. Hot takes trigger warning. The man has a lot of great theories and techniques no doubt, but he is not as in-tune with the unconscious as he thinks he is.
Week 1: The moment of inspiration
The first lecture was preceded by a 20 minute songwriting exercise, which according to Dave is relatively how long the moment of inspiration lasts. It’s like eating a meal he says. It’s about grabbing as much excess of inspiration as you can in the moment, for you cannot access that moment later. Try to prevent the “garage door” from closing on your creativity by developing multiple parts in an instant and not being too judging to them, but rather trusting in the parts you come up with and allow for tweaks later in the process. Do not waste time looking for a “memorable chorus.” I asked him a questions about his praised Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds album and he says that he loves Brian’s new piano album, and enjoys when music switches genres. Most classmates’ songs were stripped down and folk-y this week.
Week 2: Patterns
As said in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpaiW-Vezok “The first thing I ask myself these days is ‘does it make a satifying pattern?’ ....does it shimmer and ripple in new and exciting ways?‘”
I have to say that this I found to be the strongest lecture. I think that developing rhythmic patterns is one of Dave’s strongest abilities and this lecture solidifies this. He takes apart a few of his newer songs according to their wave-like melody shape that literally reverses the melody at points and mutates the waves together, and deconstructs the beats into their competitions for space in the low end of a low and high kick, or super intricate high hat patterns, often adding a 2nd high hat in the 4th bar and overall getting more chaotic to make up for lost time in a grid feel during the 4th bar. I asked a question about quantization and got this response:
“as far as quantization, for me, it depends on the song. sometimes not quantized at all; sometimes 100% grid mode.
my sonic ideal is dilla: as long as the distance between 1 and 1 is pretty locked, anything can happen in between. if it’s at all consistent, our ear finds the pocket. slightly early backbeat can be amazing. or a late backbeat. pushed or early kick happening in the middle of the measure is gonna feel aggressive and intense. late or lazy kicks in the middle of the measure, whole different feel. dilating the time in a specific kick/snare interplay in the middle of the measure and then buying the time back by, for example, rushing the fourth beat is going to feel a certain way too! anything is possible, any feel can be beautiful and perfect and deepen the emotion of the song — it just depends on the song! but generally i think it’s good to be a little wary of the grid. songs that feel inappropriately quantized often hit me as lethargic, or not confident/trusting, or just boring. as a listener, i'll take looser over tighter pretty much ten times out of ten. imagine you wanted to write someone a thank you note. you looked up ‘thank you note template’ online, signed your name at the bottom of the first or second google hit, and pressed send. sometimes quantization feels that way. it’s the default. it’s an abstraction/reduction of what rhythm is, with no actual specific musical relationships playing out, and no feelings or history. the grid is the law. but you want to be true & honest to the song. i find the inverse of the dylan quote from absolutely sweet marie — ‘to live outside the law, you must be honest’ — is often pretty true in music: ‘to be honest, you must live outside the law’. … that said, i think break-thru is pretty grid mode”
He also used a student’s song to demonstrate alternation between trochee and dactyl poetic meter in vocal phrasing.
Week #3: The Mayor Mode
This stage of the songwriting process comes after 1 & 2, being in that it is very different from the non-judgemental early parts of the song. This is the point when you want to start making judgemental decisions in the song. If the part you wish to add or take away is a large part of the song, consider scrapping the whole idea. The main structure should already be outlined. He advocates the use of Feynman's diagram of story writing, which I just looked up and is not a real thing, or maybe I am misremembering it, but it is essentially this: The song should be a story. There should be a beginning development, an inciting incident, a rising action, a climax, a falling action, and a resolution. The climax should be the bridge. He lists four great prompts for this. It usually is in contrst to the rest of the song. He advocates for going to the sub-dominant or sub-tonic, which is basically either the 7th or the 4th. Idk I don’t know much about theory but I agree about that! He also makes a metaphor with Jurassic Park about the beginning of the songwriting process is where you get your Dinosaur DNA, and the rest is where you get your frog DNA. Dinosaur DNA is essentially originality, and Frog DNA are common tropes and nuances that are specific to certain genres.
Week #4: The song is over, if you want it
Classmates’ songs were covering the map at this point in pop, dance, experimental, psychedelia, and folk. Dave is a musician’s musician, so it’s only natural that the stuff is mind-blowing. In the final lecture, he advocates that the song being done now is better than later, which is the mentality from the first lecture. He advocates to not spend more than a day mixing, and that sometimes mastering is indeed not needed.
Overall, Dave prioritizes speed above the unconscious I find. But that’s a good thing in his case. It causes him to have a balance between the unconscious and the conscious/theoretical aspects of music. It certainly works for him. He mentions his self-titled being an example of something that he put too much effort into, which is an extremely insightful comment that makes sense. He says at the top of songwriting hierarchy, he first thought it was lyrics, then he thought it was to be true to the writer, and now he finds it is to be modern. To be able to make people see things in new and unique ways. An aside: Bob Dylan’s songwriting book coming out in the fall is called the Philosophy of Modern Songwriting.
Dave is certainly not my favorite philosopher, but he is indeed as Pitchfork famously said, an artistic genius. I am extremely grateful for the experiences I learned and feedback I received in this class and would sign up again in a heartbeat.
