Dirty Projectors have announced that their new album, ‘Song of the Earth’, will be released on April 4. ‘Song of the Earth’ is credited to Dirty Projectors and the pan-European collective-orchestra Stargaze, as a joint album.
‘Song of the Earth’ is an album that addresses the climate crisis, and its first preview, ‘Uninhabitable Earth, Paragraph One’, is a musical adaptation of the first paragraph of ‘The Inhospitable Planet’, the famous book by David Wallace-Wells . In fact, Wallace-Wells recites the first phrase in the first seconds of the song.
This is how Dave Longstreth explains ‘Song of the Earth’: «The need to write this music arose in the fall of 2020, when T was pregnant with our daughter. The fires in California were raging, as they are now. We took a flight to Juneau with all the seats empty. It was in the middle of the pandemic, no one was flying. “The irony of escaping fires by burning more coal.” Longstreth explains that, upon arriving in Alaska, he found a very different scene, full of nature and peace.
‘Uninhabitable Earth, Paragraph One’ opens the new stage of Dirty Projectors in the form of an epic and luminous ballad that combines folk and orchestral elements. In particular, in ‘Uninhabitable Earth, Paragraph One’, the choruses of the Dirty Projectors vocalists (Felicia Douglass, Maia Friedman and Olga Bell) and the use of strings and brass winds stand out.
‘Song of the Earth’ will feature other notable collaborations such as Phil Elverum (Mount Eerie), Steve Lacy, Patrick Shiroishi, and Anastasia Coope.
Dirty Projectors’ latest album was a compilation of their five EPs published during 2020, ‘5EPS’.
