David Longstreth’s Song of the Earth, a song cycle for orchestra and voices, is performed here by Longstreth with his band Dirty Projectors—Felicia Douglass, Maia Friedman, Olga Bell—and the Berlin-based chamber orchestra s t a r g a z e. The album also features Phil Elverum (Mount Eerie), Steve Lacy, Patrick Shiroishi, Anastasia Coope, Tim Bernardes, Ayoni, Portraits of Tracy, and the author David Wallace-Wells. Longstreth says that while Song of the Earth—his biggest-yet foray into the field of concert music—"is not a ‘climate change opera,’” he wanted to “find something beyond sadness: beauty spiked with damage. Acknowledgement flecked with hope, irony, humor, rage.”
David Longstreth’s Song of the Earth, a song cycle for orchestra and voices, is out April 4, 2025 on Nonesuch/New Amsterdam Records in the US and Transgressive Records outside the US. Performed by Longstreth with his band Dirty Projectors—Felicia Douglass, Maia Friedman, Olga Bell—and the Berlin-based chamber orchestra s t a r g a z e, the album also features Phil Elverum (Mount Eerie), Steve Lacy, Patrick Shiroishi, Anastasia Coope, Tim Bernardes, Ayoni, Portraits of Tracy, and the author David Wallace-Wells. The album track “Uninhabitable Earth, Paragraph One,” a word-for-word setting of paragraph one of Wallace-Wells’ 2019 bestseller The Uninhabitable Earth, is available now. The accompanying lyric video, shot by Jake Longstreth, features drone footage of Lake Tulare in California, which dried up from agricultural irrigation but re-emerges periodically from excessive rain or snowmelt.
Longstreth wrote the first draft of Song of the Earth in six “manic” weeks for a commission arranged by s t a r g a z e, feeling disoriented, but also galvanized, by the moment he was in: the pandemic chaos, the “radical psychedelia” of new fatherhood, the novelty of writing for large ensemble. He then spent three years revising, rewriting, rearranging, and recording in studios and homes in the Netherlands, Los Angeles, and New York City.
Song of the Earth marks Longstreth’s biggest-yet foray into the field of concert music. It received its US premiere in a March 2024 sold-out performance at Disney Hall in Los Angeles with the LA Philharmonic. Work-in-progress performances also took place between 2022 and 2024 at the Barbican in London, Hamburg Elbphilharmonie, and Muziekgebouw Amsterdam.
Longstreth explains, “The need for this music arose in a few days in Fall of 2020, when T was pregnant with our daughter. The fires in California were insane, as they are right now. We got on an empty flight to Juneau. It was the middle of the pandemic; no one was flying. The irony of escaping the fires by burning more carbon.” He describes what they found upon arrival: “The beauty and restorative cool of Alaska. A muddy bald eagle sitting on the shale stone bank of a coastal slough surrounded by rotting carcasses after the salmon run.”
Longstreth says that while Song of the Earth, “is not a ‘climate change opera,’” he wanted to “find something beyond sadness: beauty spiked with damage. Acknowledgement flecked with hope, irony, humor, rage.”
Just as Dirty Projectors’ Rise Above sounds nothing like Damaged—the Black Flag album upon which it was based—Song of the Earth bears little resemblance to its namesake: Gustav Mahler’s 1908 song-poem Das Lied Von Der Erde. But Longstreth notes that “it is saturated with the Mahler work’s themes, feelings, and spirit of dissolved contradiction.”
David Longstreth is a Grammy-nominated singer, songwriter, producer. He started the band Dirty Projectors, and is known for collaborations with Solange, Björk, Kanye West, and others. In the last two years, he has scored films: the independent feature Love Me (2025) and A24’s The Legend of Ochi (2025). He co-wrote and produced “My Name” with Kara Jackson and Ayha Simone for RedHot’s TRANSA compilation (released in November 2024), as well as songs with Kate Bollinger, Blake Mills, and Vance Joy. He has selectively toured the US with his TBA-d/lo series of in-progress material. The most recent Dirty Projectors release is 5 EPs (2020), a series of interlocking EPs showcasing members of the band. Dirty Projectors are Felicia Douglass, Maia Friedman, Olga Bell, and David Longstreth.
s t a r g a z e is a European orchestral collective of contemporary musicians, an ever-evolving project marrying modern composition with alternative attitudes and sounds, working in innumerable collaborations with renowned artists and locations, continually closing redundant gaps between classical and popular music. s t a r g a z e has worked in the past with Terry Riley, John Cale, Julia Holter, Lee Ranaldo, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, and many others.
André de Ridder’s stylistic versatility from Baroque to contemporary music makes him a much in demand conductor. He founded s t a r g a z e in 2013 and has recorded works by Max Richter, Bryce Dessner, and Jonny Greenwood among many others. De Ridder initiated the recording of Terry Riley’s In C on the album Africa Express Presents: Mali, with Malian musicians, Damon Albarn, and Brian Eno.
