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.”
At forty-three, Longstreth is tall, left-handed, handsome, and creaturely. He scrunches into chairs with his legs folded, and drives his car in a relaxed, almost reclined posture. Lately, he has worn his dark hair short and kept an articulated mustache. He tends to dress in loose earth tones, vintage sweaters, and chore jackets. In conversation, he is sincere and thoughtful, with the open, generous demeanor more typical of someone who has recently taken a heroic dose of mushrooms. The pleasantness of his company sits unsteadily beside his reputation for being, at times, hard-driving, harsh, and unempathetic. People in his orbit repeatedly described him to me as “intense,” with varying degrees of affection and animus. “Dave is really funny, he’s devilishly smart—what a smiley, loving guy,” Katy Davidson, who performs as Dear Nora, said. “Underneath that, there can sometimes be turmoil and tension. Those things show up in the music. He’ll take you to a beautiful place, but there will be an edge to it.” Lucy Greene, a friend of Longstreth’s from high school and college, described him as “profoundly loyal” and sensitive to others’ struggles. “If you had his admiration, it could launch a thousand ships,” she said. “But he also had the capacity to lethally wound people—to injure people in a deep, deep place. If we were to try to connect it to the artistry, I would say he really feels the full range of emotions. Some of his songs are exquisitely beautiful. It’s very plaintive, and it gets excruciating.”
In 2021, not long after the fires, Longstreth began working on “Song of the Earth,” a song cycle inspired by Mahler’s “Das Lied von der Erde,” from 1908. He had long admired Mahler’s symphony for its expansiveness and audacity. “The idea of somehow capturing an experience of Earth, human or otherwise, in a song, seemed very grandiose,” he said. We were on a walk, squinting against the haze. “But it also seemed sort of magical.” Longstreth’s “Song of the Earth,” which will be released as an album in early April, weaves the usual elements of Dirty Projectors—guitar, drums, and four voices, including Longstreth’s—through textured orchestral music performed by the chamber group Stargaze. (The piece was developed for the group.) It is moving and unusual. André de Ridder, the conductor of Stargaze, told me that the work has “a sense of space, a sense of longing, a sense of epic journey, a sense of urgency.” Longstreth thinks of it as “landscape music,” in contrast to portrait-oriented songs about people: “music that feels like the natural world, and feels tilted on its side, like a landscape orientation.”
Two-thirds of the way through the album is a song called “Uninhabitable Earth, Paragraph One”: a near-verbatim setting of the first paragraph of David Wallace-Wells’s best-selling 2019 book about climate change, “The Uninhabitable Earth.” Longstreth had picked it up on a whim at Newark airport. He read the first page with a sense of “giddy disbelief”: after decades of decorous scientific communication about global warming, Wallace-Wells leaned into truth and terror. “I felt like I had just been slapped,” Longstreth said. At one point, trying to convey the song’s intended energy, he played me the opening to Nirvana’s “Floyd the Barber,” then pulled up photographs of a Butoh performance. This was inscrutable. “There’s irony, there’s humor,” he explained. “It’s wearing a mask to tell the universal truth.” In the book, he said, Wallace-Wells “gets a little futurist Nostradamus on it,” and predicts that, one day, there may not be art about climate change: everything will just be embedded with the emotional texture of life during environmental collapse. “He presents it as far off, but I feel like we’re already there,” Longstreth said. “The simultaneous awareness of and inability to acknowledge our destruction of the planet could be the room tone of all twenty-first-century testimony.” All songs were climate songs; all paintings were climate paintings. He pointed to “Twisters” the recent tornado film, and “The Meg,” a 2018 movie about ancient, ferocious, enormous sharks. Rihanna’s “Umbrella” was a climate song, he suggested, in the same way that “White Christmas” was a Second World War song. “This already is our art,” he said. “And ‘Song of the Earth’ is a very pastoral contribution to that conversation.”
Longstreth was raised in Southbury, Connecticut. His mother, Carolyn, was an assistant district attorney for the state, and his father, John, left a career at a community bank to study at the Yale School of Forestry, eventually becoming the director of a local Audubon center. The pair, Stanford graduates involved in the back-to-the-land movement, were birders with a D.I.Y. sensibility. They kept a vegetable garden, raised sheep and chickens, and worked constantly on their eighteenth-century home. During one renovation, they pulled up a floorboard in the entryway and found a pewter coin from the seventeen-hundreds, commemorating the founding of the country. The family had an extensive record collection, which was Longstreth’s primary exposure to music. “I know now that there was a hardcore scene in Connecticut, but we were totally disconnected from that,” he said.
In 1995, Longstreth, then thirteen, taught three of his friends to play drums, bass, and guitar, and started a band called Cartesian Divers. “He wanted to be in a band, he didn’t know any musicians, so he made musicians,” Peter Sobieraj, a childhood friend who played bass in the group, said. “There were times we were practicing twelve hours a day.” That year, Longstreth’s brother, Jake, went off to college, leaving behind a TASCAM 424 Portastudio, and Longstreth began experimenting with multitrack recording. “The tapes were amazing, just the layering,” Jake, now a painter in Los Angeles, said. “They were crudely played, but the ideas were so rich.” In the tenth grade, Longstreth transferred from the local public high school to Phillips Academy, a private boarding school in Andover, Massachusetts. “It’s almost hard to talk about how sincere I felt about studying and learning and the value of knowledge, the reliability of history,” he said. “I just ate it all up.”
He went to Yale, but felt an immediate aversion to it. “Oh, this is where the children of the very wealthy learn to trade in the signs and signals of power,” he recalled thinking. Lonely and alienated, he dropped out after two years, and crashed with Jake in Portland, Oregon. He had begun releasing music as Dirty Projectors, and, using MySpace, booked himself a national tour, playing “ice-cream shops, people’s apartments, moms’ basements.” The following semester, under pressure from his parents, he grudgingly returned to Yale, where he studied composition. To make money, and “in a slightly Charlie Kaufman-esque spirit,” he worked part time for Domino’s. (“The only weird part was delivering pizza to Yale,” he said.) The composer Missy Mazzoli, a graduate student at the time, recalled visiting his apartment and finding the floor covered in sheet music. “There was an obsession there, and a single-minded focus, which I was always really jealous of,” she said. “I thought, This is someone who feels he can, or has to, tune the world out_._” Longstreth regularly performed in Brooklyn, where a passionate, scrappy indie-rock scene had taken root. Bands played in warehouses, basements, and unmarked, illegal venues on the Williamsburg waterfront. There was a sense of community; the stakes felt low, and the creativity was high. “Five-dollar cover, P.B.R. in a bucket behind a folding table, one of the bands, maybe in a biodiesel school bus, from DeKalb, Illinois—and they have a saxophone player,” he recalled. It was “an actual D.I.Y. subculture incongruously blooming beneath the scaffolds of rapid gentrification.”
Yale’s music program leans heavily on the classical canon. Longstreth’s senior thesis, an opera based on the testimonies of the disciples of the Heaven’s Gate cult, for which he’d designed an original notation system, received a D. But by then he had put out five full-length albums, and was getting attention in the music press. One review, published by Pitchfork in 2004, described him as “a nobrow genius, who claims to find similar solaces in the work of Beethoven, Wagner, Zeppelin and Timberlake.” After graduation, he didn’t want to move to New York. “It was too hard to live in big cities, and the music you would make was safe, or social, or functional in that way,” he said. “It wasn’t the product of idle experimentation, daydreaming, hours of unhurried exploration.” He wound up in Brooklyn anyway.
In 2006, Longstreth met Amber Coffman, a San Diego-based singer and guitarist. He told me, “She was this soulful, savant shredder,” as well versed in prog rock as in nineties R. & B. Coffman moved to New York to join Dirty Projectors, and began attending practice sessions in a deteriorating Brooklyn brownstone where Longstreth lived with a revolving group of other musicians, including Phosphorescent’s Matthew Houck, Ra Ra Riot’s Wes Miles, and Ezra Koenig, the front man of Vampire Weekend. At the time, Koenig was an English teacher with Teach for America; Longstreth recalled him leaving early in the mornings, wearing a tucked shirt, a braided belt, and a tie. “I’d never been exposed to Ivy League kids, or the East Coast at all,” Coffman told me. “We were working ten- and twelve-hour days, rehearsing. No one I knew would even fathom doing that.” Initially, she enjoyed it. “It’s exhilarating to learn where your limits are, and push through them,” she said. Longstreth described it as a “cone of focus,” where everything else dropped away.
During rehearsals, Coffman and Longstreth began to fall for each other. “It totally caught me off guard,” she said. “It just came over the room. It felt very innocent.” At the time, Longstreth was working on “Rise Above,” a reinterpretation, from memory, of a Black Flag album. The songs were written for the higher end of his own register, to strain his voice. “For me to be singing there, it’s yelpy as hell,” he said. Coffman, who had grown up singing R. & B., made intricate compositions more approachable. “Amber is one of the vocalists of our generation,” Longstreth said. The album “Bitte Orca,” released in 2009, pushed Dirty Projectors into the mainstream. By that point, the band had a relatively stable lineup, including the bassist Nat Baldwin, the drummer Brian McOmber, the multi-instrumentalist and singer Angel Deradoorian, and the vocalist Haley Dekle. Longstreth’s songwriting played on sharp juxtaposition and counterpoint. “He has this amazing ability to cast a group together as one entity, like a collective voice,” the artist Jacob Collier said. Onstage, Coffman, Deradoorian, and Dekle were thrilling to watch. “The harmonies of those three women were almost inhuman,” the musician Tyondai Braxton told me.
More albums followed—the collaboration with Björk and, in 2012, “Swing Lo Magellan.” The band played Letterman, Carnegie Hall, and Jay-Z’s Made in America festival. By then, the scene had gone mainstream. Kanye West was collaborating with Bon Iver; Jay-Z and Beyoncé showed up to see Grizzly Bear on the Brooklyn waterfront. Indie bands were featured in ads for Volkswagen and Taco Bell. A large mural of the album art for “Swing Lo Magellan”—a photograph of Coffman and Longstreth chatting with a neighbor—was painted on a wall near an exit of the Bedford L train. (It was an ad for an upcoming show at the bandshell in Prospect Park.) “Indie rock was in its imperial moment, it was a hot thing,” Longstreth said. “Maybe what the crowds truly longed for was something liquid and poetic and difficult to quite put a label on?”
By early 2013, Dirty Projectors had been touring for nearly a year straight. Longstreth was burned out. His artistic project had become a business, and it was in the red. He was exhausted and disillusioned. “Is it insane that the goal, at a certain level of touring, is to produce the exact same show every single night?” he asked me. As the tour came to a close, he and Coffman began looking for a new manager, with the plan to work on her solo début, then record another band album. That spring, Noah Baumbach enlisted the band members to appear in “Mistress America,” a film starring Greta Gerwig as a flamboyant, lost thirtysomething cavorting about New York with her future stepsister, a freshman at Barnard. “Greta and I wanted to depict the coolest night a college kid could possibly imagine,” Baumbach told me. “And part of that experience was getting to go backstage with a great downtown band.” In the film, Baldwin, Coffman, Longstreth, and the drummer Mike Johnson play to a packed house at the Warsaw, in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, then hop among after-parties. Onstage, Longstreth is beaming and convivial in a button-down and skinny jeans; per usual, he plays a right-handed Stratocaster, restrung and upside down. Coffman looks focussed but amused. When I watched the film recently, it felt less like a time capsule than like a fantasy.
Around 2014, Longstreth met with Rick Rubin, the producer and co-founder of Def Jam Recordings. Rubin set him up with Kanye West, who at the time was hosting a series of informal songwriting sessions at his home in Los Angeles. “It was a ‘show up at this address in the Hollywood Hills at 10 P.M.’ thing,” Longstreth said. He recalls that West had recently married Kim Kardashian, and that the house, his former bachelor pad, was largely unfurnished. In each room was a different artist. Longstreth posted up near the laundry room with a laptop and a MIDI keyboard, and was given a folder with songs in progress, one of which was a fragment of a collaboration between West and Paul McCartney. “It sounded strange, and also classic,” he said. “I was looping it, and looping it, and suddenly thought, What if this thing had a bridge?”
A few months later, he flew to Mexico, where West was hosting another songwriting session, and added three-part vocal harmonies to the bridge he’d written. The song later became “FourFiveSeconds,” recorded by West, McCartney, and Rihanna. “The small amount of time that I spent in the Kanye West world kind of blew my mind open,” Longstreth told me. West was an “inspiring figure, honestly—just effervescent creativity, energy on a level that you don’t encounter. I thought he was probably going to die soon, because of how much he was giving at every moment.” He was struck by West’s “Warholian” world view, which seemed to hold that life itself was the art work. He told me that more recent developments, such as West’s antisemitic rants on social media, were “beyond the pale.” Longstreth understood West’s trajectory, from artist to edgelord, as a contemporary phenomenon. “Kanye exemplifies the collapse of the twentieth-century ideal of avant-garde into the twenty-first-century online context,” he said. “The person who’s right on the edge.”
Around that time, Longstreth collaborated with Solange, produced an album for the Tuareg musician Bombino, and worked on an orchestral arrangement for Joanna Newsom. But it was also a period of uncertainty. He and Coffman had broken up, and the friendship was fragile. The band was on a hiatus of sorts. “I thought, The dynamic, it’s a little precarious,” Byrne, who released and performed music with the band in the late two-thousands, recalled. He’d observed frictions within the group. In any band, he said, “there’s more income for the writer than for the players and singers, and that can create great tensions.” Coffman chalked up some of the strain to Longstreth’s style as a bandleader. “For all of Dave’s gravitating toward outside-of-the-box, scrappy musicians to play this music, there was an insatiable ambition, an untethered ambition,” she said. “Dave doesn’t really have an Off button. That became a huge issue, because he also doesn’t have the ability to suss out other people’s limits, physical limits and mental limits. I think we probably could have achieved a lot of what we were doing with a little bit more balance.” Longstreth noted, “It was a combustible thing. It felt like we all, in our heart of hearts, were making concessions and compromises we knew we couldn’t sustain forever.” He paused. “I guess I’m describing every rock band ever.”
In Brooklyn, the indie-rock scene was giving way to something colder and more commercial. D.I.Y. venues were crowded out by condominiums and luxury stores. Artists felt pressure to self-promote on social-networking platforms. Spotify had entered the American market; Live Nation and Ticketmaster, a monster conglomerate, had the events industry by the neck. Musicians found themselves struggling to accommodate a data-driven, algorithmic, corporate music culture. Longstreth felt “claustrophobic” being tied to a waning scene, and to the idea of Dirty Projectors as a rock band.
At the start of 2015, Longstreth and Eggers, who had recently begun dating, moved to L.A. There, he worked closely with Coffman, as a producer on her solo début album. “We were like family, and we were friends,” he said. This went well until it didn’t. Longstreth had also been working on an album; it featured Tyondai Braxton and Dawn Richard but was essentially a solo effort. When Coffman heard the music, she was floored. It was a bracing collection of breakup songs, packaged as a self-titled record by Dirty Projectors, with lyrics that swung from mournful to vicious. (“What I want from art is truth / what you want is fame / now we’ll keep ’em separate and you keep your name.”) She begged Longstreth not to release it, especially not under the band name. “I told him that if he did I would never work with him again,” she said.
“Dirty Projectors” came out in early 2017. Coffman and Longstreth had never publicized their relationship; suddenly, fans and critics were trying to map the album’s lyrics onto real life, dissecting a breakup that had happened years prior. Coffman felt humiliated and betrayed. “The agency I should have had over the narrative of my record was stolen,” she told me. “I had waited my whole life to do this, and I felt I didn’t get to experience it on my own terms.” Eventually, she released a statement saying that she had left Dirty Projectors and ended her friendship with Longstreth. Save for the odd run-in, they have not spoken in nine years.
Longstreth is a world-builder. “The Getty Address,” from 2005, is a concept album about the Eagles’ Don Henley. “A song about Don Henley’s suicide, and you knew you were up for something spicy,” Björk said. (Henley is alive.) Sometimes the narrative of Longstreth’s work is more meta: he has said that “Bitte Orca” was intended to be “almost a kind of caricature” of the band. The self-titled album was an experiment in Warholian integration, an attempt to merge life and myth to create “a snow globe of clear feeling.” (Coffman saw it as a “cowardly, vindictive piece of work.” “I’m sure it was very cathartic for him,” she said. “I was not touched.”) The album was a bid for universality; it was received as a self-portrait. “Either I was doing some sort of trance on myself or I was really naïve about the separateness of art and life,” Longstreth said. “Maybe I got into a tunnel with that album. I don’t love to talk about it.”
The record was a departure, too, from the version of Dirty Projectors that had crystallized in the public imagination. “This really fertile period of the Amber-Angel group defined the band in a lot of ways that maybe Dave never anticipated,” Peter Berard, an executive at Domino, the band’s former label, said, noting that the cover art for “Bitte Orca” featured photographs of Deradoorian and Coffman’s faces. This was at odds with Longstreth’s conception of Dirty Projectors as a “movable feast”—a fluid thing that followed his own musical exploration. For various reasons, his relationships with the other former band members from that era have grown brittle. “At that point in my life, I was pushing forward as hard as I could—we were trying to go somewhere, do something crazy, do something extraordinary,” Longstreth told me. “I wasn’t always mindful of other people’s feelings.” Baldwin, McOmber, and Deradoorian all declined to speak with me for this piece. (Dekle did not respond to my requests.) “I am unwilling to do any more free labor for Dave’s benefit,” a former collaborator wrote.
The fallout from the self-titled album was an “awakening,” and a reckoning. “I didn’t realize music could hurt people,” Longstreth said. “It was horrible. At the time, I felt misunderstood. But it was näive and incurious of me, building these emotional worlds in song, not to imagine the actual emotional worlds of other people. Particularly the ones I love. Recognition of that brutal irony was the starting point of a journey for me.”
In 2022, Longstreth taught an online songwriting workshop with School of Song. He told the class that the self-titled album, then five years old, had been on his mind. “I lost myself making that album,” he said. “I got confused about the border between art and life.” He described a part of the songwriting process as going into “goblin mode.” (The phrase had become a kind of class meme.) “I want to live a good life, and do good for my community and the people I love, but I’m drawn into this strange relationship with a dark power,” he went on, illustrating the goblin-songwriter mind-set. “One that sometimes can make me monomaniacal, oblivious to the feelings of others, selfish.” Even so, he felt that this process was worth protecting. “Our gut decisions are smarter and truer than the choices we belabor with our conscious minds,” he said. “We might not like what we see if we allow ourselves to write this way, but that’s a question to resolve in the lives we lead as much as in the songs we write.” More recently, he quoted a short poem by Mark Leidner to me: “One does not begin a poem / one abandons one’s life.”
Longstreth works out of a studio apartment attached to his house, a drafty Victorian in Echo Park. When I visited last fall, a pomegranate tree, heavy with fruit, shaded the front stoop. Inside the studio were a Rhodes, a Wurlitzer, a baby grand piano, several guitars, a harpsichord, and, in a small wood chair, the Brazilian singer-songwriter Tim Bernardes. (“I think he’s like Elvis,” Longstreth said. “He’s as singular, expressive, and idiosyncratic in his low register as he is up in falsetto.”) Lately, Longstreth has been writing piano songs, with an eye toward making a new album. That morning, he had asked Bernardes to listen to some of the demos. Many of the recordings were made on his phone, and in some Alma, his three-year-old daughter, could be heard in the background. Bernardes, who is in his early thirties, with owlish eyes and long, wavy hair, looked enchanted.
At one point, Bernardes played a recording of Robert Schumann’s “Dichterliebe,” from 1840. A German tenor, operatics dialled to eleven, rang out. “This is sick. Could you sing this?” Longstreth asked Bernardes. “Imagine Elvis in the mid-seventies singing this.” He played the song again, and began to warble, Elvisly, over it.
“The music I like the most is very beautiful music, but there’s some small twist of poison,” Bernardes said. “This has a lot, and many of your songs, too. The beauty is almost like a double exposure with some weirdness. It’s not a weird song with beautiful stuff. It’s beautiful songs with twisted feelings.”
Things got back on track, and Longstreth played another demo: melismatic ornamentation, vocal harmonies, and shifting tonal centers. The refrain—“my feelings / are the only real things”—had been inspired by Alma’s tantrums. “Could I own that?” he asked. “It’s a ridiculous line.”
“It isn’t,” Bernardes said.
“My feelings are the only real things?” Longstreth asked.
“I think it’s very profound.”
During our time together, Longstreth was in a generative moment. He had recently completed an eighty-minute orchestral score for “The Legend of Ochi,” an A24 adventure film, directed by Isaiah Saxon, about a species of crypto-zoological primates who communicate through song. He’d started a Substack, Well-Tempered Zealot. The writing was good—inventive and bloggily baroque. He was working with other musicians, striving for mutual inspiration and good will. “Dave seems to be, with time, quite open, accepting, and almost seeking out a plurality of opinions and voices,” Olga Bell, a periodic member of Dirty Projectors, who performs on “Song of the Earth,” told me. “Good old wisdom and maturity come for all of us, right?” Parenthood had been transformative. “It’s insane, the level to which emotion is just right there for me right now,” he said. “I haven’t felt this much change internally since I was a teen-ager.” Music had always been a way for him to process emotion, and he felt preternaturally inspired. “All that churn just makes me feel so alive,” he said. “And to see that reflected in literal life . . .” His eyes welled. “It’s just so, so lucky.”
The first version of “Song of the Earth” came together in six weeks. One of Longstreth’s practices is to write chamber-music versions of songs in progress, to better understand their arrangements. During the pandemic, he found himself returning to unused scores he had written in his twenties. “I always liked the idea of mulching them, letting them become something else, become something new,” he said. In the process, he noticed a special affinity between “ecology, wilderness, Gaia,” and orchestral music. This, in turn, influenced “Song of the Earth.” He had not set out to write about fossil-fuel extraction or planetary destruction, but “climate definitely entered the chat,” he told me. “My feelings about water and air and trees and mountains and wilderness and rain and heat had all become a bit strange and pocked.” Last year, I saw Dirty Projectors perform a version of “Song of the Earth” with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Longstreth, in a moss-green cotton suit, cut an odd silhouette against the uniform polish of the orchestra. The performance was exhilarating and unsettling. “In Dave’s work, conflict is both a huge theme and approach,” Saxon said. “It feels like there’s a battle happening.”
In 2018, Longstreth and Johnson were joined by the singers and musicians Felicia Douglass, Maia Friedman, and Kristin Slipp. (Slipp has since left the band.) Dirty Projectors performs only occasionally; all the members have their own music projects. Longstreth, for his part, was excited about the prospect of writing more concert music. He had always been drawn to “epic, multipart works that were worlds unto themselves,” like Philip Glass’s Qatsi trilogy or Lil Wayne’s “Tha Carter” series, and wondered if “Song of the Earth” could be the start of something bigger. The prospect of a ten- or twenty-year project was appealing.
A few weeks after the listening session with Bernardes, Longstreth drove up to West Marin with his dog, Lou. He had two shows lined up in Point Reyes Station, a rural town with a fragile water system and world-class birding, and planned to visit his parents, who have lived in the area for almost twenty years. Driving through the Central Valley, a crucible of industrial agriculture, he found himself writing new lyrics to some older Dirty Projectors songs that he planned to perform. “A song is a living thing,” he told me. “How capacious is it? How elastic?” He compared rewriting lyrics to twice-exposed film, and to pentimento. “Like an old Giotto painting, where some of the pigment has faded,” he said. “You see a previous painting underneath the one you’re invited to regard as finished. If I’m giving the audience the opportunity—or the inconvenience—to hear two songs at once, I like that.”
Point Reyes is a small, nosy town. Outside the Dance Palace, which had the folding-chair feel of a community center, a group of concertgoers discussed whether Carolyn and John Longstreth were full-time residents or second-homers. “His mom’s a big native-plant person,” a member of the group reassured the others. That night, Longstreth played some of the in-progress piano songs, and the entirety of “Swing Lo Magellan” alone on guitar. The performance was unpolished, even unrehearsed, but it was a warm room. Watching him felt, pleasurably, like hearing someone think out loud. Afterward, he asked his longtime engineer, Robby Moncrieff, what he thought about the show. “I think you need to practice more,” Moncrieff said.
A few days later, we drove out to the beach. It was late afternoon and overcast. We parked at a trailhead, and Longstreth, who wore a purple wool sweater over an inside-out hoodie, paused under a tree, looking for owls known to live in its branches. We followed a narrow path along a marsh, over a sand dune, and onto the beach. On my visits to Los Angeles, Longstreth had shown me around a bit—his brother’s painting studio, the art gallery where Eggers is a director—and I’d found it funny to spend so much time talking about the natural world while sitting in, or looking at, traffic. It felt like a luxury to be out of the built environment, sheltered by dramatic, snaggy cliffs.
Longstreth removed his sneakers and placed them behind some beach grass. While writing “Song of the Earth,” he’d thought often of Olivier Messiaen’s “From the Canyons to the Stars,” a symphony from 1974. “It seems to suggest a connection between the expansiveness of wilderness and the limitlessness, call it the psyche, of the human,” he said. I asked for clarification. “You’re looking up at the stars, and, you know, the stars are in your brain,” he offered, bafflingly. Later, listening to “Song of the Earth,” I thought I understood a little better what he meant. Down by the water, a man lay alone on his back, his head covered with a black shirt. “He has the right idea,” Longstreth said.
In early January, I took an evening flight to Los Angeles, planning to spend another few days with Longstreth. As we approached the greater metropolitan area, passengers began holding their phones up to the plane windows; the Palisades Fire, which had broken out that morning, glowed beneath us. A few minutes later, as the plane began its descent into Burbank, people began to murmur in alarm. A second fire, farther east—the Eaton Fire, around Altadena—had started while we were in the air. The Santa Ana winds, which were driving the fires’ spread, buffeted the plane; the pilots weren’t able to land on the first attempt. When we eventually reached the tarmac, gale-force winds rocked the fuselage. At baggage claim, I called friends and asked if I could crash with them, instead of staying in Pasadena as planned. Through the sliding glass doors, I watched a woman vomit neatly into a trash can.
The following morning, the sky was dark, the air was full of ash, and the horizon was a murky crimson. My friends and I decided to leave the city. As we drove east, we passed tractor-trailers lying on the shoulder of the road, blown over by the wind. A few hours later, Longstreth and Eggers packed their car and drove to the desert, where they gathered with friends and family. “The desert is very alien,” Longstreth said. “The nothingness is very existential.” That day, Nonesuch announced “Song of the Earth” and released the Wallace-Wells setting as its first single. This had been scheduled for weeks, but it felt almost too apt. “Some combination of sadness—alienation—implication—whatever the word is for ‘negative kismet’—for releasing this song into the world the same day as the fires destroyed so much of the city where I live,” Longstreth wrote in Well-Tempered Zealot. “I can’t embrace what it feels like for life and art to blur like this.”
A few weeks later, we met back in Los Angeles. Echo Park is downwind from Altadena, and Longstreth’s block had been covered in a light dusting of toxic ash. He was in a strange headspace. The fires were still burning, and the city felt subdued. A number of his friends had lost their homes. He had spent hours in a mask and gloves, cleaning ash from between the tiles of the patio and the bricks of the house. Painter’s tape lined the window frames, a makeshift sealant. Longstreth approached the situation with a kind of fatalism. “Los Angeles is always a dreamscape and an apocalypse,” he said. He was underslept and over-caffeinated, in a loose and voluble state. Squirrels had got to the pomegranate tree outside his house, and fruit hung hollow on the branches.
We went to his studio, and he put on Mahler’s “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen,” sung by the mezzo-soprano Janet Baker. He had first heard the mid-century recording as a teen-ager at boarding school digging around in the music library, and immediately felt that he understood it, despite not speaking German. “There are certain singers who just have an entirely somatic quality, you feel their soul,” he said. A minute in, folded into his chair, he silently began to cry.
“Sorry,” he said, when the song ended. I had given him a tissue, and he passed it over his face. “I think there’s something, to me, about the sense of being in nature, and being at one with nature, and the way that puts you a little bit at odds with society,” he went on. “I’m not seeing a mirror of my life—certainly, when I was sixteen years old and discovering this, I don’t know how it was hitting me. But, yeah, this sense of being lost and then discovering something else, or being dead and being alive.” He was staring at the computer, where he’d pulled up an English translation of the lyrics. “The way she comes in very quiet—she emerges out of this very quiet instrumentation. She says, ‘I am.’ ” He paused, and suggested that we talk about something else. Then he began to cry again. “This is an odd involuntary reaction,” he said. “It’s very embarrassing.”
We sat together for a little while, not uncomfortably. Songs were “little imagination machines,” he told me. At their best, they could inspire others to open a door, go deeper, change their lives. He said that he wanted to read me something he’d recently written, and scrolled through notes on his laptop. “A song possesses its own internal logic,” he read, then looked up apologetically. “This is annoying, but I just want to get to the thought.” He turned back to the computer. “Every song becomes a model of an alternative world, a little allegory of what is or might be possible, a little signpost to the listener.” He gestured faintly toward the window. “Do you want to move your life a little bit more in this direction? Could you imagine a world where things are a bit more this way?” ♦
