Here’s 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. David Longstreth, leader of the Dirty Projectors, has teamed with his bandmates (Felicia Douglass, Maia Friedman, and Olga Bell), the chamber orchestra s t a r g a z e, and a cast of noteworthy guests on a new album “song cycle” called Song Of The Earth.

Set for release in April, the release is billed as Longstreth’s biggest foray into orchestral music. He wrote it during six “manic” weeks, upset and inspired by the present circumstances of his moment (the pandemic, new fatherhood, the fresh challenge of writing for an orchestra) followed by three years of revisions in locales such as the Netherlands, Los Angeles, and New York City. During these years, Longstreth staged several “work in progress” performances of the piece before its official premiere in 2024 at Disney Hall in Los Angeles with the LA Philharmonic.

Others contributing to Song Of The Earth include Phil Elverum (Mount Eerie), Steve Lacy, Patrick Shiroishi, Anastasia Coope, Tim Bernardes, Ayoni, Portraits Of Tracy, and the author David Wallace-Wells. Longstreth reads the first paragraph of Wallace-Wells’ bestseller The Uninhabitable Earth on “Uninhabitable Earth, Paragraph One,” out today.

A statement from Longstreth: “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.” He describes what they found upon arrival: “The beauty and restorative cool of Alaska. A muddy bald eagle sitting on the shale stone bank of a coastal slough surrounded by rotting carcasses after the salmon run.”

Unrelatedly, Longstreth performed at a Jokermen-curated David Berman tribute in Los Angeles over the weekend (not the one in NYC), and Tuesday he shared a three-song Berman covers EP called Covers For A Belated Birthday. Check that out here.

Back to Song Of The Earth: The “Uninhabitable Earth, Paragraph One” lyric video features drone footage of Lake Tulare in California, which dried up from agricultural irrigation but sometimes returns during periods of intense rain or melting snow. Longstreth’s brother Jake, a musician and co-host of Ezra Koenig’s Time Crisis, shot the footage. Check it out below.

TRACKLIST:
01 “Summer Light”
02 “Gimme Bread”
03 “At Home”
04 “Circled In Purple”
05 “Our Green Garden”
06 “Walk The Edge” (with Anastasia Coope)
07 “Opposable Thumb”
08 “More Mania”
09 “Spiderweb At Water’s Edge” (with Patrick Shiroishi)
10 “Mallet Hocket”
11 “So Blue The Lake”
12 “Dancing On Our Eyelids”
13 “Same River Twice”
14 “Armfuls Of Flowers” (Feat. Steve Lacey)
15 “Twin Aspens” (Feat. Mount Eerie & Patrick Shiroishi)
16 “Uninhabitable Earth, Paragraph One”
17 “Kyrie / About My Day”
18 “Shifting Shalestones”
19 “Appetite” (with Tim Bernardes)
20 “Bank On” (with Portraits Of Tracy)
21 “Paper Birches, Whole Scroll”
22 “Raven Ascends” (with Patrick Shiroishi)
23 “Blue Of Dreaming” (with Ayoni)
24 “Raised Brow”

Song Of The Earth is out 4/4 via Nonesuch/New Amsterdam in the US and Transgressive in the UK. Pre-order it here.