In the mid-2000s, Williamsburg’s indie crowd orbited around a bar called Zebulon. For bands like Vampire Weekend and Dirty Projectors, it was their Hawley Arms, their Rainbow Bar and Grill. “It was special,” says Amber Coffman, who from 2004 until recently – there’s no clear end date – was one of Dirty Projectors’ loopy vocalists.
The venue closed in 2012, but the bar-owners relocated west, carried out a painstaking reconstruction and recently reopened in Los Angeles, the city Coffman now calls home. “It’s like being in this weird timewarp, with the same people and the same energy but in this totally different place,” she enthuses, from a shady spot in LA’s Griffith Park. “It’s definitely a trip.”
This week, Coffman releases her solo debut, City of No Reply, which could be her own private Zebulon. It’s a playful R&B record, with the 32-year-old swapping her vocal acrobatics for intimate soul. (Her voice is in demand: that’s her singing harmonies on Frank Ocean’s Nikes.) It’s Coffman’s name on the cover, yet many of her ex-bandmates take key roles: Haley Dekle and Angel Deradoorian on backing vocals, and on production, Dave Longstreth, Dirty Projectors’ sole permanent member and Coffman’s ex-boyfriend of six years. They split in 2012, but after “quite a lot of work on being cool with each other,” says Coffman, decided to collaborate again.
Part of that was about comfort. Coffman tried a few producers before Longstreth, who has also relocated to LA. “To develop a new relationship, to navigate egos – that can be a lot, and I felt pretty protective over my ideas,” she says. “I think Dave understood what I wanted, and I could take the lead. That whole process went really well. Even though making a solo record is this new adventure, it was nice to have the element of homecoming.”
They finished the album in November 2015. The plan was for Coffman and Longstreth to make a solo record apiece, “and that we’d keep the future of the band open,” she says. But a rift opened, and they stopped talking.
Coffman had no intention to reveal any of this until she learned that Longstreth was releasing a new Dirty Projectors album this February. It traced their relationship’s arc, and oozed bitterness. “Your heart is saying clothing line / my body said Naomi Klein, No Logo,” he sniped on the first track, continuing, “What I want from art is truth / What you want is fame.” Sucker-punched, she released a statement, writing, “I consider it a loss to no longer be involved with Dirty Projectors, but ultimately walking away was the only healthy choice for me.”
In conversation, Coffman is neither hostile nor evasive, but clearly despairing – hesitant to say more and stoke unwanted drama, and frustrated that her debut album is now a gossip item. But although it is mostly focused on her recovery, City of No Reply also has its share of scathing moments. She frequently addresses an emotionally aloof guy, and asks: “How’s playing it safe working out for you?” on Do You Believe? Isn’t she fuelling the fire? She falters. “If his last record hadn’t been what it was, and mine came out, and none of our personal business was out there, I don’t know that people would be reading into things as much.”
Beyond romance, it has soured an important musical relationship. Coffman spent her childhood moving between Ohio, Texas and California as her parents divorced, reunited, then split again. Coffman credits the women of 90s R&B with having “partially raised” her as she attended 11 different schools, and says quite seriously that music saved her life. She turned to rock music in her teens, and by 18 was playing guitar in an instrumental prog band called Sleeping People. Her peers loathed R&B, but aged 22, she met a kindred spirit in Longstreth.
Coffman joined Dirty Projectors and moved into a dirty Brooklyn house teeming with future indie luminaries, including Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig, Phosphorescent’s Matthew Houck and Ra Ra Riot’s Wes Miles. “It’s weird to look back and see where everybody went,” she says. “Everything felt very promising, but how does anyone know what’s going to happen?” Dirty Projectors recorded their 2007 breakthrough, Rise Above, in the house’s mouldy basement, and started touring in a minivan for $100 a night, split six ways.
Meanwhile, Coffman kept recording her own demos, but never pursued them seriously. “When I joined the band, I was exposed to a whole new world of music,” she says. “And I was a bit taken aback – not by the band, but the entire scene of amazing musicians. I had a lot to learn. I probably felt pretty intimidated for a long time, knowing that I needed some time to get to the place where I was gonna make the music I truly wanted to make on my own.” Her fears eventually subsided, but band life took over once Dirty Projectors became stars with 2009’s Bitte Orca, putting the project on a perpetual backburner.
It took solitude to kick her solo album into gear. Following her split from Longstreth, Coffman moved to LA in 2013, looking for a place where she could make a racket without being isolated. “After so many years of my life revolving around this thing, to have that suddenly be up in the air, and to be on my own – it was pretty heavy,” she says. “I had a lot to figure out – some dead-end relationships, all sorts of growing pains.”
The album should have come out last year, “but there were a lot of delays,” she says nervously, repeating herself. “I don’t know if that really makes sense.” It sounds as though Longstreth was responsible. She laughs darkly. “Partially.”
But Coffman calls 2016 “a really tough year” in general. Last January, she publicly accused publicist Heathcliff Berru of sexually assaulting her at a bar. It prompted dozens of similar accounts; Berru lost his job and entered rehab, and Coffman became the unwitting focus of an industry flashpoint.
It took time for the impact of her actions to sink in. “It felt like a real crisis,” she says. “Truthfully, I did not exactly feel equipped to handle it.”
Understanding the pervasiveness of the issue was equally shocking. “Once you see how bad it actually is out there, you can’t un-see it, and that’s been hard. For the year to have ended with the election of a known misogynist and accused sexual abuser was just too much. It really was a year of this horrifically ugly underbelly being exposed, and a year that seemed to keep saying: ‘Hang on. It’s going to get worse before it gets better.’”
On the cusp of her 33rd birthday, Coffman is starting to move past the anxiety she explores on the record, “kind of coming into a new state of mind”. She’s been in LA for four years, and feels “as settled as I’ve ever felt”, given that she’s spent a lifetime moving. She seems happier, but shocked that she spent so many years working on someone else’s vision.
“And stepping away from my own?” she says with a questioning lilt. “I think it’s fine to be a student, and that’s sort of the way I looked at it at first, but after a while, not writing became a habit. I didn’t have a lot of personal space, and so my personal relationship with music was a bit suspended for a long time. This album was about rediscovering it.”
City of No Reply is out now.
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