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.”
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 internationally. 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, and Portraits of Tracy; it also includes words by journalist David Wallace-Wells. A three-song suite from the album—“At Home,” “Circled in Purple,” and “Our Green Garden”—is available today. It can be heard here, and a lyric video for the suite may be seen below:
Longstreth says of the suite: “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. 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.”
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.”
“Song of the Earth is a genre-bending song cycle. On the one hand modernist and minimalist but more related to The Beatles and The Beach Boys than to Mahler,” Longstreth says.
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 were again this year. 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.”
LYRICS:
AT HOME
looking at my garden through a window
looking at my garden through a window
i awoke to smoke
and i choked
a little
dark particulate flecks
stuck to the
plastic fan
in the window
looking at my garden through a window
looking at my garden through a window
CIRCLED IN PURPLE
it’s all too much
to notice or even point to
why aren’t we
reordering
our lives
same-day
it’s confusing but soothing
when the air is warm,
the water feels cooling
it feels so right
to be here at the end of
the supply chain
is it wrong ?
why, when i’m alone, do my eyes
want to cry ?
the air foreclosed the day in gray
the light sallowed the morning in orange
the map circled in purple
the map is circled in purple light
OUR GREEN GARDEN
we live in
a garden we
live in an open window
we live in
< see the beans >
a window
we live in
< wrapped around the maize >
a garden
< and the squash >
our green
garden blooms
in splendor
in an open window
why are my eyes overflowing ?
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