Ep. 34 / An Ode to Interconnectedness with Dave Longstreth, Dirty Projectors

Our latest episode of Ecosystem Member explores 'Song of the Earth', 'Mount Wittenberg Orca' and 'The Legend of Ochi'.

May 07, 2025

And we’re back!

Thank you to everyone who has stuck around over the break in new episodes the last couple of months. After recording a lot of episodes toward the end of 2024, I finally sat down in January to work on a project I’ve always wanted to tackle - writing a fiction book. After a furious five weeks and then a couple more weeks of edits and tweaks, I wrapped the first draft of a 91,466 word novel that draws on some personal life experiences and a lot of the themes that emerged in episodes of Ecosystem Member. I’m now trying to find a literary agent to help get it on bookshelves. If you know one, please send them my way.

During that time, we’ve also seen a strong push away from science and action on climate change from the new executive administration in the United States. I never wanted Ecosystem Member to be an explicitly political podcast, but it is too concerning to ignore, so expect it to come up in many of the upcoming episodes I’ve recorded over the last couple of weeks.

The first of those new episodes is with Dave Longstreth, who is best known as the musician behind the band Dirty Projectors.

I have a lot of Google Alerts set for artists I am a fan of, one of which being David Benjamin Sherry. He made the photographs of Dave for an amazing piece in The New Yorker back in March that had me immediately typing an email to Dave’s team to see if he would be willing to discuss ‘Song of the Earth’ - the project the piece is about - on the podcast. To my pleasant surprise, he said yes.

While I was familiar with the Dirty Projectors, I didn’t know a lot about Dave in particular. Unfortunately, when you Google him, one of the first search results is an article with the headline “We tried to interview David Longstreth. Probably won’t do that again.”

To that journalist, I say thank you for leaving Dave alone so I had the chance to record an episode with him. What resulted is one of the most thoughtful and open conversations I think we’ve had on the podcast. (And I’d be happy to interview him again. Hopefully we can bump that misleading headline down the Google results.)

The bulk of our conversation is about ‘Song of the Earth’, which Dave initially wrote in just a handful of weeks and then refined on over a three-year period. He was coming off of experiencing terrible wildfires in Los Angeles and heading into the birth of his daughter and the COVID-19 pandemic. It created this moment where he was able to use Gustav Mahler’s “Das Lied von der Erde” (The Song of the Earth) as a springboard for ‘Song of the Earth’, which had its U.S. premiere at Walt Disney Concert Hall on March 2, 2024 and was released as an album on April 4, 2025.

Although skeptical of songwriting with a message, Dave used the feeling of a natural landscape that he experienced listening to Mahler’s work to explore our fractured relationship with nature in ‘Song of the Earth’. On one occasion that fracture is explicit. He uses the first paragraph of David Wallace-Wells’ ‘The Uninhabitable Earth’ for ‘Uninhabitable Earth, Paragraph One”, the first song released from the album.

What really struck me though is how Dave uncovered his own ingrained antagonism with nature in himself, before expressing his desire for oneness with nature in writing ‘Song of the Earth’. We dig into where we think that antagonism comes from and how even conversations like his episode might be a form of protest against and resistance to that antagonism.

In addition to ‘Song of the Earth’ we discuss ‘Mount Wittenberg Orca’, his collaboration with Björk, where he imagines the singers in the band as a pod of whales, with Björk as the mother whale. Dave also shares the intricacies of the musical language of the mythical Ochi in the new A24 film he scored ‘The Legend of Ochi’.

There’s so much interesting discussion in this chat that it is almost double the length of our usual episodes, but I couldn’t bear to cut much. I hope you enjoy it and I hope you pick up a copy of ‘Song of the Earth’. It is available on Spotify, Apple Music and all of the other streaming platforms, but I recommend purchasing a digital or physical copy from the more artist-friendly Bandcamp.