Dirty Projectors, with three new members, will open first tour in five years in San Diego on Saturday

San Diego Union-Tribune

May 10, 2018 8:45 AM PT

Breaking up is hard to do, as Dirty Projectors’ mastermind David Longstreth and former Dirty Projectors’ singer Amber Coffman can attest.

Former San Diegan Coffman joined the New York band in 2006 as a singer and rhythm guitarist. She and singer and lead guitarist Longstreth were a couple until 2012, but worked together for several more years.

He produced her 2017 debut solo album, “City of No Reply,” but not before suddenly releasing a wildly ambitious solo album, titled “Dirty Projectors,” about their breakup.

On Saturday, Longstreth and the latest edition of Dirty Projectors kicks off its first tour in five years here at the Music Box. The band now teams him, bassist Nat Baldwin and drummer Mike Johnson with three new members — percussionist-singer Felicia Douglass, guitarist-singer Maia Friedman and keyboardist-singer Kristin Slipp.

It remains to be seen who covers Coffman’s lead vocal parts or how many songs the band will preview from its new album, “Lamp Lit Prose,” which is due out July 13 and features such guests as Haim and Fleet Foxes’ Robin Pecknold.

The one song released from the album so far, “Break Through,” features intricately snaking guitar lines that suggest Longstreth has been spending a fair amount of time listening to the music of Nigerian music great King Sunny Adé. It is also the first song in memory that name-checks both Italian film giant Federico Fellini and Strokes’ singer Julian Casablancas.

Dirty Projectors: 9 p.m. Saturday. The Music Box, 1337 India St., downtown. $27 (general admission), $104 (concert and dinner package for two), plus service fees; must be 18 or older to attend. (619) 795-1337. frontgatetickets.com

george.varga@sduniontribune.com

Twitter @georgevarga

Music

George Varga

San Diego Union-Tribune music critic George Varga began drumming in rock bands at 12 and writing professionally about music at 15. A Louisiana native who grew up mostly in Germany, Varga has earned three Pulitzer Prize nominations for his writing at the U-T and is a voting member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In addition to providing live coverage of the Grammy Awards and festivals from Coachella and KAABOO to the 1994 edition of Woodstock, he has interviewed everyone from Miles Davis, Britney Spears and (over a game of chess) Ray Charles to Willie Nelson, Kanye West and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Anthony Davis. A triple first prize-winner for criticism and arts writing at the 2022 San Diego Press Club awards and a double first prize-winner at the 2022 San Diego Society of Professional Journalists awards, Varga is also a contributing writer for Jazz Times magazine and has written for Billboard, Spin and other publications. After attending San Diego City College and San Diego State University, he created and taught the 2002 UC San Diego Extension course, “Jazz in a Post-Ken-Burns World.” Varga has written liner notes for more than a dozen albums, including by jazz sax greats James Moody and Michael Brecker, and contributed two chapters to the book, “Dylan: Disc By Disc.”