From the Pitchfork interview with Dave Longstreth of Dirty Projectors:

But maybe the expectation that what a lyric means to you is not what it’s going to mean to someone else is at the core of an idea like Dirty Projectors; maybe it’s just very contrary of me to try to write simple shit. I don’t know. I just don’t want to do the same thing over and over again. I do feel like the hardest thing is to do something simple and tap into whatever remains of our common language rather than cultivating your own willfully esoteric vocabulary.

A common language. I also love where Longstreth talks about “the idea of letting a recording be a moment in time.” As he says, “With digital recording, it’s easy to create a perfect text of whatever song you have, but we kept on coming back to imperfection and fragility.” I’ve always been drawn to this idea, especially in music (like the door squeaking open in that one Guided by Voices song). –NI