Composer and 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 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, 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. 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 today. 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.