David Longstreth’s Song of the Earth, a song cycle for orchestra and voices. 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.”
David Longstreth’s Song of the Earth, a song cycle for orchestra and voices, was released 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, Song of the Earth 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. You can take a quick look inside in this vinyl unboxing:
“Heroic in its scope and shifting moods,” exclaims Mojo in a four-star review. Stereogum says: “A project you’ll want to check out if you have a taste for ambitious, collaborative efforts and/or if you’re concerned about the future of the planet." The New Yorker calls it “an album that captures the beauty, and the peril, of nature." And Pitchfork named it one of the 50 Most Anticipated Albums of Spring 2025.
A lyric video for the album track “Blue of Dreaming,” with Ayoni, featuring drone footage by Jake Longstreth, is also out today:
“One afternoon in April of 2011, I wrote a little lullaby. I didn't know where it'd come from. It didn't make sense in my life at the time: I had no one to sing a lullaby to. So I made a little recording and forgot about it,” Longstreth says. “Smash cut exactly a decade: my newborn daughter Alma is in my arms, little as a loaf of bread, and I’m singing to her all the time. Up from the recesses of memory that old melody floats. Over the course of several hushed nights, it becomes ‘Blue of Dreaming,' the hopeful and primary-colored paean to Gaia consciousness that closes Song of the Earth."
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. It is a genre-bending song cycle,” he continues. “On the one hand modernist and minimalist but more related to The Beatles and The Beach Boys than to Mahler.”
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. The song cycle 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.
David Longstreth is a Grammy-nominated singer, songwriter, producer. He started the band Dirty Projectors, and is known for collaborations with Solange, Björk, Rihanna, and others. In the last two years, he has scored films: the independent feature Love Me (2025) and A24’s The Legend of Ochi, released earlier this year. 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.
