The New Yorker:

Between brutal fire seasons in Los Angeles, David Longstreth wrote “Song of the Earth,” an album that captures the beauty, and the peril, of nature.

By Anna Wiener

In 2020, California was swept with some of the worst wildfires in its history. One morning in September, David Longstreth woke up at his home in Los Angeles to find the sky glutted with smoke. His wife, Teresa Eggers, was three months pregnant, and the couple decided to book a last-minute trip to visit a friend in Alaska. The Burbank airport was deserted. They boarded their flight wearing masks and plastic face shields, and discovered that they had the plane nearly to themselves. The irony of burning more carbon to escape the consequences of burning too much carbon wasn’t lost on them. When they got to Juneau, the landscape was cool and lush, and the air was clear. “The idea of the forests as the Earth’s lungs, it felt literal,” Longstreth recalled. “What an exhalation for us.” It was the end of the salmon run, and the streams were thick with decomposing carcasses; other animals had set upon them, an interspecies feast. Bald eagles and red-tailed hawks stood sentry on lampposts. “The assertiveness of nature felt different,” he said. “The number of birds in the sky, in the trees—just teeming life everywhere.”

Longstreth is a musician, composer, and producer, best known for his work under the band name Dirty Projectors. The group, which he started as a college student, was a paragon of the Obama-era indie-rock ecosystem. “Is there a 23-year-old alive in northern Brooklyn who’s not making music right now?” New York magazine asked in 2009. “What are they all after? It could be that they want to be David Longstreth.” He has collaborated with Joanna Newsom, Solange Knowles, Major Lazer, and David Byrne. Björk, who released an EP with Dirty Projectors in 2010, called Longstreth an “idiosyncratic talent,” and told me that he is “psychic in his way of writing melodies for other singers.” A classically trained musician, he has a complicated harmonic language and an incredible ear for a hook. His work draws on jazz, folk, pop, classical, West African guitar music, and Slavic choral traditions: chaos on paper, but it works. “There’s lots of tricky musical stuff going on, like bars and measures in odd time signatures,” Byrne told me. “These things contribute to the music sounding familiar but a little off-kilter.” One of Longstreth’s trademarks is treating production like an element of orchestration; another is his voice, a folkie, feral tenor that he pushes until it cracks. Hrishikesh Hirway, a musician and the host of the podcast “Song Exploder,” said, “I don’t understand how his brain works. With other musicians, it’s my job to try and get deeper into their process—it’s a matter of turning up the lights. With Dave, I feel like I’m walking into a pitch-black room.”

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