Dirty Projectors, David Longstreth – Song Of The Earth (2025) [FLAC 24bit/96kHz]

Dirty Projectors, David Longstreth – Song Of The Earth (2025)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:04:02 minutes | 1,28 GB | Genre: Alternative, New Age, Folk
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Transgressive

David Longstreth’s Song of the Earth, a song cycle for orchestra and voices, is released on 4 April 2025 via Nonesuch/New Amsterdam Records in the US and Transgressive Records for the rest of the world. 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, 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 s t a r g a z e, 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.Five years after COVID was declared a pandemic, lockdown albums continue to emerge. David Longstreth, leader and sole constant member of the collective Dirty Projectors, has said he wrote Song of the Earth in six “manic” weeks dictated by the uncertainty of being a new father as the world shut down—but it’s much more than just another example of musical PTSD. A song cycle composed for the Berlin chamber orchestra stargaze (conducted by André de Ridder), Song of the Earth is pure emotion, but not all gloom and doom. Second track “Gimme Bread” starts off a little dozy, with tentatively plinking piano, before the metaphorical curtains are thrown open—brash horns, glistening strings, exaggerated “yeah! yeah! yeah!” The song builds and runs to something so showy it’s almost old Vegas loungey, as bass trombone stomps in like the Abominable Snowmonster. But are the trilling woodwinds celebrating, warning or mocking our collective naivete? Because it then flows into a trio of tracks—”At Home,” “Circled in Purple,” “Our Green Garden”—that catalog the horrors of California in the fall of 2020, as wildfires burned right alongside optimism (“I awoke to smoke/ And I choked a little”). “Uninhabitable Earth, Paragraph One” is an energetic bummer: “It is worse, much worse than you think/ The slowness of global warming is a fairy tale/ Perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isn’t happening at all,” it quotes from David Wallace-Wells’ book The Uninhabitable Earth.

There are, however, so many lovely moments that don’t require reliving the horrors of the past; in fact, Song of the Earth would make a great focus record for when you need to put your head down and get shit done. It travels the hills and valleys of dreamy folk (“Walk the Edge,” sung by Felicia Douglass and Maia Friedman with guest Anastasia Coope), indie pop (“Opposable Thumb”), the cool touch of ’80s New Age (“Shifting Shalestones”) and even R&B (“Blue of Dreaming”). There are guest turns from Steve Lacy (tremulous “Armfuls of Flowers”), soulful young YouTube star Portraits of Tracy (“Bank On”) and Brazilian singer Tim Bernardes (blink-and-you’ll-miss-it “Appetite”). Tenor saxophonist Patrick Shoroishi duets with Longstreth’s vocalizations on “Spiderweb at Water’s Edge” and joins Mount Eerie’s Phil Elverum for “Twin Aspens.” Among the orchestral standouts is Maaike Van Der Linde, whose flute—vacillating between lonesome and piercing—is an alpha character on “Mallet Hocket.” And when it all ends with “Raised Brow,” and the song grows and grows, threatening to explode … then doesn’t, it feels like Longstreth’s merciful sigh of relief. – Shelly Ridenour

Tracklist:

1. Dirty Projectors & David Longstreth – Summer Light (00:55)
2. Dirty Projectors & David Longstreth – Gimme Bread (05:50)
3. Dirty Projectors & David Longstreth – At Home (02:46)
4. Dirty Projectors & David Longstreth – Circled in Purple (03:13)
5. Dirty Projectors & David Longstreth – Our Green Garden (01:57)
6. Dirty Projectors & David Longstreth – Walk the Edge (01:20)
7. Dirty Projectors & David Longstreth – Opposable Thumb (04:19)
8. Dirty Projectors & David Longstreth – More Mania (03:01)
9. Dirty Projectors & David Longstreth – Spiderweb at Water’s Edge (01:52)
10. Dirty Projectors & David Longstreth – Mallet Hocket (02:26)
11. Dirty Projectors & David Longstreth – So Blue the Lake (02:10)
12. Dirty Projectors & David Longstreth – Dancing on our Eyelids (02:14)
13. Dirty Projectors & David Longstreth – Same River Twice (01:16)
14. Dirty Projectors & David Longstreth – Armfuls of Flowers (02:00)
15. Dirty Projectors & David Longstreth – Twin Aspens (03:11)
16. Dirty Projectors & David Longstreth – Uninhabitable Earth, Paragraph One (03:52)
17. Dirty Projectors & David Longstreth – Kyrie / About My Day (03:12)
18. Dirty Projectors & David Longstreth – Shifting Shalestones (01:04)
19. Dirty Projectors & David Longstreth – Appetite (01:14)
20. Dirty Projectors & David Longstreth – Bank On (06:15)
21. Dirty Projectors & David Longstreth – Paper Birches, Whole Scroll (02:09)
22. Dirty Projectors & David Longstreth – Raven Ascends (03:01)
23. Dirty Projectors & David Longstreth – Blue of Dreaming (03:38)
24. Dirty Projectors & David Longstreth – Raised Brow (00:55)

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