Dirty Projectors: About to Die EP

In an interview with Paste leading up to the release of the excellent Swing Lo Magellan earlier this year, Dirty Projectors’ songwriter Dave Longstreth indicated that he had “70 ideas” and “40 finished demos” from a year spent holed up in a previously abandoned house in New York’s Delaware County. Twelve of these became that LP, but simple math leaves quite a bit of unaccounted material that seems destined to turn up in some manner.
Enter the About to Die EP, the first subsequent offering from the band, standing as a humble collection of three previously unreleased tracks and the Swing Lo Magellan standout for which the EP is named. Closing out a year for the critically adored group that also included the premiere of their short film Hi Custodian, About to Die runs the risk of seeming like an afterthought; a few b-sides pressed on vinyl to promote a new single after the band had completed their more pressing artistic endeavors. But, anyone who has followed the career of the Dirty Projectors could attest to how seriously Longstreth and company take their craft, and About to Die is no different, standing slight only in its length and providing another win for the band’s nearly blemishless record.
As Longstreth told us, the selection of songs that comprise Swing Lo Magellan aren’t necessarily the best ones of the 40 he had to choose from (“I think a lot of the songs from that era are fucking good”). Instead, creating the album rested on finding a set of songs that work as a unit despite being written as stand-alone entities, and About to Die’s four songs wear their individuality like a badge of honor.