2025 is starting on a high with Song of the Earth, the newly announced collaborative album from producer, multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter David Longstreth and Berlin-based experimental ensemble s t a r g a z e. A song cycle for orchestra and voices performed by Longstreth with his band Dirty Projectors – Felicia Douglass, Maia Friedman, Olga Bell – and s t a r g a z e, and conducted by André de Ridder, Song of the Earth also features a stellar cast of guest contributors including Phil Elverum (Mount Eerie), Steve Lacy, Patrick Shiroishi, Anastasia Coope, Tim Bernardes, Ayoni, Portraits of Tracy, and the author David Wallace-Wells.
The first draft of Song of the Earth was written by Longstreth over the course of six “manic” weeks for a commission arranged by s t a r g a z e, in a period where he had to coordinate the pandemic madness, new fatherhood and writing for a large ensemble for the first time. Longstreth comments:
“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, as they are right now. 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.”
According to him, Song of the Earth “is not a ‘climate change opera” but he wanted to “find something beyond sadness: beauty spiked with damage. Acknowledgement flecked with hope, irony, humour, rage.”
Song of the Earth arrives on April 4th through Transgressive Records (UK) and Nonesuch/New Amsterdam Records and we can already get a first marvellous taste from it with album track ‘Uninhabitable Earth, Paragraph One’, taken from the opening paragraph of Wallace-Wells’ 2019 bestseller The Uninhabitable Earth. The single comes with an accompanying lyric video featuring drone footage of Lake Tulare in California, which dried up in the 1880s from agricultural irrigation but has reappeared during periods of wet weather. The video was shot by Jake Longstreth and you can watch it below.