In 2022, Dirty Projectors frontman David Longstreth premiered a song cycle called Song of the Earth at Hamburg, Germany’s Elbphilharmonie. He composed the piece for the Berlin-based chamber orchestra Stargaze, and Longstreth went on to perform it at Amsterdam’s Muziekgebouw, London’s Barbican Hall, and Los Angeles’ Walt Disney Concert Hall.
All the while, Longstreth kept tweaking the piece, rewriting, rearranging, and, ultimately, recording it in the Netherlands, Los Angeles, and New York. He has now announced the official Song of the Earth album, which will be released on April 4. (Nonesuch and New Amsterdam are handling the album’s U.S. release, while Transgressive will issue it in the United Kingdom.) Below, find the lyric video for the song “Uninhabitable Earth, Paragraph One.” David Longstreth’s older brother, Jake, shot the visual, featuring drone footage of California’s Lake Tulare.
Song of the Earth shares a title with composer Gustav Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, and Longstreth said, in a statement, that the album “is saturated with the Mahler work’s themes, feelings, and spirit of dissolved contradiction.”
Further inspiration came from journalist David Wallace-Wells and his 2019 book The Uninhabitable Earth. Longstreth recites the book’s first paragraph on today’s new song, which he describes as “the Beavis-and-Butthead version of Song of the Earth.” In a statement, Longstreth reflected on the composition, especially in light of the ongoing California wildfires:
Today, I woke up and the air in our house is thick and smoky. The Eaton fire in Altadena has spread to 2,227 acres overnight. My brother and his family got their evacuation orders at 3 a.m. (They are OK.)
I’ve been working on an album called Song of the Earth for the last four years. Surreal for the subject matter to meet me at my doorstep today.
“Uninhabitable Earth, Paragraph One” is like the Beavis-and-Butthead version of Song of the Earth. It’s stupider and funnier and more insane. It’s got kind of a Gen-X fatalism, and fatalism is one side of the coin.
Most of Song of the Earth is landscape paintings and nature poems, but “Uninhabitable Earth, Paragraph One” is an anthem. Today it feels topical.
When I read the first paragraph of David Wallace-Wells’ book The Uninhabitable Earth, I thought of the emperor Haile Selassie’s 1958 address to the United Nations. His words were so timeless and self-evident that they needed to be turned into a song—so Bob Marley wrote the song “War” as a word-for-word setting.
