Dirty Projectors Dissects “Up in Hudson” on “Song Exploder”: Kanye, Bowie, and More: Listen

The “Song Exploder” podcast, which features artists breaking down their songs, has just shared its 100th episode. This one features Dirty Projectors. Dave Longstreth discusses the process behind his Dirty Projectors track “Up in Hudson.” He says he had the idea to write a song that was “sort of like a Paul Thomas Anderson movie, but instead of 30 years compressed into three hours, it would be seven years compressed into seven minutes.” Of its stark lyrics, he says, “instead of using abstract concepts or language to get at real feelings, it’s almost the opposite. It’s using the language of really personal, vivid emotion, to talk about these larger things.” He also speaks about working in a studio right next to Tyondai Braxton’s, separated only by a thin wall. (Braxton is interviewed in the podcast.) The song’s coda, Longstreth adds, was written in the wake of David Bowie’s death and is “like an elegy”; he also describes Kanye as an “important spirit for me.” Listen to the entire thing below.

Read Pitchfork’s new feature on Dirty Projectors.

Speaking about the song’s style, Longstreth says:

Kanye was an important spirit for me, making this album. In the chorus, I was thinking about that Hudson Mohawke synth from “Blood on the Leaves” that’s just so cutting and fierce. 

He also discusses the extent to which the song is autobiographical, saying it could just as easily be a “generic” story. On that, he concludes:

I made the record over the course of a long time. I’m in a very different spot in my life now than the stories I’m telling in the album. I thought I would feel more protected knowing that I’m telling a fictionalized, old, outgrown version of a self that I maybe inhabited in certain moments years ago. I thought I would feel a separation from it. But the separation is not real to other people. … It’s been intense. 

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