THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “David Longstreth’s Song Of The Earth is a song cycle for orchestra and voices. Performed by Longstreth with his band Dirty Projectors — Felicia Douglass, Maia Friedman, Olga Bell — and the Berlin chamber orchestra Stargaze, 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 wrote the first draft of Song Of The Earth in six “manic” weeks for a commission arranged by Stargaze. He was feeling disoriented, but also galvanised, 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 foray into the field of concert music. It received its U.S. premiere in a March 2024 sold-out performance at Disney Hall in Los Angeles with the L.A. 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. 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, humour, 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.”
Longstreth is a Grammy-nominated singer, songwriter and 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 The Legend of Ochi. The most recent Dirty Projectors release is 5 EPs (2020), a series of interlocking EPs showcasing members of the band.
Stargaze are 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. Stargaze have worked with Terry Riley, John Cale, Julia Holter, Lee Ranaldo, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith and many others.”
