Temecula Sunrise

This was a track taken from Bitte Orca, Dirty Projectors' first album for Domino Records.

Temecula is a city in south-western Riverside County, California. Pitchfork.com asked singer/guitarist Dave Longstreth if he'd ever visited Temecula. He replied: "I've driven through, yeah. As we're driving through it's just like, improbably brand new construction homes as far as the eye could see. [Former Dirty Projector] Susanna [Waiche] was like, 'My grandfather and I used to go for picnics up when the flowers would bloom for like two weeks up in the hills here.' It was so hard to imagine. My friend James Sumner [the animator who worked on The Getty Address] and I, were talking about how warehouses in the late 20th century were these bohemian zones for artists to camp out and work on their art projects. These disused spaces of a formerly industrial economy, or whatever. We were thinking about the same sort of thing happening when the kind of like social or economic impetus that drove these huge new construction swaths of suburbia and the exurbs of all these American cities. We imagined whole subdivisions would get colonized by these kids who paint the houses like these beautiful, crazy murals and work on their funny escapist utopian art projects in McMansions. [Laughs] So the song is sort of about that."