Q. Is that why you like Lil Wayne, for the language? Or for the beats?

A. I love the beats. [The 2007 mixtape] “Da Drought 3,” a lot of that is him remaking stuff that was on the radio. That’s part of what I love about it, is the inventiveness of it, the freedom of it, the kind of looseness of it. He’s rewriting some other stuff from somebody else and making it his own. I don’t like digital recording that just presents like a perfect text, this overedited perfect vision of an accessible idea. What I love about some of those Wayne mixtapes is they’re such a spectrum of his persona, and it’s just loose and fun. I get the same thing out of [Neil Young’s] “Tonight’s the Night” — this feeling of, this is a moment that happened, that happened one time, and we were a part of it. Because they didn’t do 80 million takes and iron out all the idiosyncrasies or something. This Dirty Projectors record is kind of like that. A lot of my vocals were the first time I ever sang the song.