A three-song suite from the album Song of the Earth, David Longstreth’s song cycle for orchestra and voices he performs with his band Dirty Projectors and the chamber orchestra s t a r g a z e—“At Home,” “Circled in Purple,” and “Our Green Garden”—is out now, along with a lyric video you can watch here. “Past reports of Dirty Projectors going full prog are greatly exaggerated; until now I’ve never released an album with a straight-up suite of songs," Longstreth says. "As the slashes in the title imply, this is a three-song suite. It’s just the way it happened. Consider it an entry in your ‘A Day in the Life’ / ‘Paranoid Android’ / ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ / ‘Sicko Mode’ category: a sprawling journey that feels like slipping into a dream. A kaleidoscopic river-of-consciousness.”

Composer/performer David Longstreth, whose new album with his band Dirty Projectors and the chamber orchestra s t a r g a z e, Song of the Earth, is out April 4, stopped by for the Nonesuch Selects video series, in which artists visit the Nonesuch office, pick some of their favorite albums from the music library, and share a few words on their choices. He chose recordings by David Byrne, Jonny Greenwood, Bulgarian State Television Female Choir, Caetano Veloso, Tyondai Braxton, Scritti Politti, and João Gilberto, and from the Nonesuch Explorer Series.

David Longstreth’s Song of the Earth, a song cycle for orchestra and voices, is due April 4. 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, conducted by André de Ridder, 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.”