Dirty Projectors are back — Dave Longstreth has returned with news of a sprawling new album called Song of the Earth, and he's heralding the announcement with new single "Uninhabitable Earth, Paragraph One."
Song of the Earth is described as a "song cycle for orchestra and voices," and it's April 4 via Nonesuch/NewAmsterdam Records. Longstreth wrote the first draft of the album during a "manic" six weeks, originally for a commission arranged by orchestral group s t a r g a z e. Feeling "disoriented, but also galvanized" by pandemic chaos, the "radical psychedelia" of new fatherhood and the novelty of writing for a large ensemble, he stumbled into what would eventually become Song of the Earth.
"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," Longstreth said in a statement. "It was the middle of the pandemic; no one was flying. The irony of escaping the fires by burning more carbon."
What he found when he arrived was "the beauty and restorative cool of Alaska. A muddy bald eagle sitting on the shalestone bank of a coastal slough surrounded by rotting carcasses after the salmon run."
Performed by Longstreth and his band — Felicia Douglass, Maia Friedman and Olga Bell — and the Berlin-based s t a r g a z e, the album also features Phil Elverum of Mount Eerie, Steve Lacy, Patrick Shiroishi, Anastasia Coope, Tim Bernardes, Ayoni, Portraits of Tracy and the author David Wallace-Wells.
First single "Uninhabitable Earth, Paragraph One" is, as its title suggests, a word-for-word retelling of paragraph one of Wallace-Wells' 2019 bestseller The Uninhabitable Earth.
Check it out below, along with the album's 24-song tracklist.
Song of the Earth:
1. Summer Light
2. Gimme Bread
3. At Home
4. Circled in Purple
5. Our Green Garden
6. Walk the Edge
7. Opposable Thumb
8. More Mania
9. Spiderweb at Water's Edge
10. Mallet Hocket
11. So Blue the Lake
12. Dancing on our Eyelids
13. Same River Twice
14. Armfuls of Flowers (feat. Steve Lacy)
15. Twin Aspens (feat. Mount Eerie)
16. Uninhabitable Earth, Paragraph One
17. Kyrie/About My Day
18. Shifting Shalestones
19. Appetite
20. Bank On
21. Paper Birches, Whole Scroll
22. Raven Ascends
23. Blue of Dreaming
24. Raised Brow