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IN 1966, the American innovator Stewart Brand launched a public campaign to persuade NASA to use its nascent satellite-photography technology in a very specific way—to create an image of Earth. He printed up buttons and posters with the question “Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?”
Brand was born in the Rust Belt city of Rockford, Illinois, then educated in both New England (at the traditional upper-crust boarding school Phillips Exeter Academy) and Northern California (at the more future-focused Stanford University). Which is to say, he had experienced firsthand America’s various stripes of regional ambition, and maybe that’s why he became a classic example of a rather sui generis American type—the huckster-cum–public intellectual, a circus barker and IRL influencer. (Indeed, during Brand’s campaign to release a whole-Earth photo, he met with a similar figure, Buckminster Fuller, who offered to help him with his projects.)
As it happens, the following year, in November 1967, NASA released the first whole-Earth photo, taken by Applications Technology Satellite 3, otherwise known as ATS-3. Brand used NASA’s image on the cover of the first edition of what would become his popular Whole Earth Catalog series of books in 1968. That same year, astronaut Bill Anders took another photo of our planet while orbiting the moon, with the lunar surface in the foreground and Earth in the far distance, swimming in a sea of black. The photo came to be known as Earthrise, and it was used on the cover of a 1969 edition of the Whole Earth Catalog.
The proliferation of these images has been credited with kick-starting the environmental movement. The first celebration of Earth Day was in 1970, and Brand’s brand became inexorably linked with this new form of consciousness. The Catalog became a sort of bible for various subcultures of the 1960s and ’70s: hippies, the back-to-the-land movement, environmentalists, and, eventually, nascent tech bros. (In an oft-memed 2005 commencement address at Stanford, Steve Jobs described the Catalog as “Google in paperback form, thirty-five years before Google came along.” His speech even signed off with a quote from the Whole Earth Epilog [October 1974], ostensibly the Catalog’s final issue: “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish.”) It was a perennial bestseller and, in 1972, won a National Book Award.
But looking at Earth from such a perspective—detached, idealistic, and abstract—was a choice more appropriate for those times. Our understanding of twentieth-century environmental catastrophe was visual and tangible—smog over cities, growing landfills, an occasional river on fire. The twenty-first century calls for a different perspective as our ecological issues grow both larger in scale and less dramatic to the naked eye: climate change, migration under duress, invisible microplastics in the water, forever chemicals everywhere else.
THE SONG CYCLE Song of the Earth, by indie rock bandleader, producer, and composer David Longstreth, makes the case that a musical perspective may be ideal for these times. As a medium, sound is more abstract than a photograph or other imagemaking, but also more emotion-soaked, perceived not just as ideas but as embodied sensation. Longstreth’s view is largely intimate and essentialist. It is a walk in the woods, not a flight through space. A hike through a forest, not a slide under a microscope. A series of minute observations, not a telescopic study. Neither technical nor utopian, it is not a systematic scientific exploration or a hustle to persuade us to move to the country, where a better lifestyle—enabled by gadgets—awaits.
Almost forty musicians are credited on the recording, and there are moments where you feel the full impact of those large forces. For example, an early piece, “Gimmie Bread,” features blaring horns, massed voices, and a galloping percussion section that would sound at home on a blockbuster film soundtrack; toward the end of the album, “Bank On” repeats and riffs on the same melodic theme at an equally grand scale. However, on most of Song of the Earth, the orchestra rarely feels “orchestral”—blurring into a mass of sonic overwhelm with singers on top. Rather, individual voices and instruments tend to bob and weave in and out of tight focus, coalescing into smaller groups engaged in subtle interplay. On “Spiderweb at Water’s Edge,” Vitalii Kyianytsia’s piano creates a patiently meandering melody, while Patrick Shiroishi’s tenor saxophone and Longstreth’s wordless vocalizations engage in their own close dialogue. You’d be excused for taking it as a literal depiction of an arachnid spinning its web by a pond, both objects shimmering in the light, as perceived by a human observer.
Song of the Earth was composed as a concert work, created for two dozen members of the pan-European chamber ensemble s t a r g a z e and the voices of Longstreth and three female vocalists from Dirty Projectors, a band he started over two decades ago. Cheekily, it shares its title with proto-modernist composer Gustav Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, a nearly 120-year-old orchestral piece with similar themes and duration, which Leonard Bernstein once called Mahler’s “greatest symphony.” But the degree of ornament and detail audible on Song of the Earth makes it clear this is not just a vérité document of musicians in a concert hall. It is an orchestral recording.
The composition premiered at Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie in 2021, and was reworked for a second performance in Antwerp scheduled for May 2022 (though canceled due to Covid), after which initial recordings of the s t a r g a z e ensemble were made. Further performances at London’s Barbican in October 2022 and Los Angeles’s Walt Disney Concert Hall in March 2024 were interspersed with periodic additional sessions; more than a half dozen guest performers, mostly vocalists, were presumably recorded during further remote sessions.
IN LONGSTRETH’S VISION we experience an ordinary encounter with nature that, in the 2020s, feels more relevant and profound than the earlier, airier, and more aspirational perspectives of Mahler or Brand. We catch the scent of pine, crunch leaves underfoot, and listen to the babble of a stream and a song two people are singing. That description of paired singers is often made literal. Band members Felicia Douglass and Maia Friedman hocket* the vocal on “Same River Twice,” a tool Longstreth has deployed to great effect throughout the Dirty Projectors catalogue. Another particularly striking vocal duet occurs on “Twin Aspens.” The first third of the piece is instrumental, the mood both glimmering and threatening, bringing to mind a less abrasive version of György Ligeti’s “Atmosphères,” a composition made famous by its appearance on the soundtrack to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). That similarity starts to seem intentional when Longstreth’s singing is punctuated by a memorable spoken-word passage from guest Phil Elverum, aka Mount Eerie, in which an actual monolith seems to come into view:
And there it was, glinting in the streambed / Metal from another time / Columns collapse and nourish new roots / I look up through stars among the leaves at these two aspens / And forgotten constellations take new form.
Even in this rare instance of a distant, cosmic perspective, the song concludes with Elverum’s gaze turning inward: “And I saw / The dream in the wide sky / Come in close.”
The album’s lyrics often portray a personal retreat into an arcadian wilderness—summer light, shifting shale stones, paper birches, armfuls of flowers. However, just past the halfway point, darker imaginings of how humanity has affected our home come into clear view. “Uninhabitable Earth, Paragraph One” sets the opening page of David Wallace-Wells’s book of the same name to music, assaulting our “anthology of comforting delusions,” drawing out the folly of taking comfort in Earth’s pleasures because, as Longstreth sings, “It is worse, much worse, than you think / The slowness of global warming is a fairy tale / Perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isn’t happening at all.” Where a more traditional orchestral song cycle would find the vocalist projecting in the manner of an opera singer, Longstreth’s part is close-miked and pitch-shifted, while his cadence recalls the chanted anthems of Bone Thugs-n-Harmony. Finally, in the same song, a series of rhythmic woodblock melodies reminds me of the polyphonic bleep of clickers opening car doors. Our innocent encounter with nature ends with a return to the parking lot.
In Song of the Earth, humans keep emerging like this—sparingly and disruptively, but always foolish. The one-two punch of “Gimmie Bread” and “Bank On” echoes the same melody while their free-associative lyrics poke fun at how we’ve built society around the abstraction of money. (“Something to pay the rent with / Something so I can spend it” goes a lyric in the former; “Banks out of concrete and gold / Bank that old apocalypse” goes a lyric in the latter.) “Opposable Thumbs” draws its title from the seemingly trivial genetic advantage that has created our environmental crises—our uniquely able hands, which enabled tools, technology, warcraft, bloodshed, and the writing instruments that, one hopes, might get us out of this predicament. Indeed, isn’t it the job of journalists, artists, and philosophers to harness the power of human imagination and dream us out of our apocalyptic human mess? Is that what Song of the Earth aims to do?
While closely noticed, Song of the Earth also strikes me as a fundamentally imaginary journey extrapolated from a windowsill’s view. Longstreth began writing this piece during the Covid pandemic, and it brings to mind those days, a time many of us allowed our minds to free-associate possible futures. If you know about its pandemic-era origin story, Song of the Earth plays like a science fiction film in which a time traveler from the future warns us about dangers to come. In January of this year, on the day the Song of the Earth album was announced, wildfires were actively ravaging neighborhoods in Longstreth’s adopted home of Los Angeles.
When the music finally stops, there’s blood on the floor, sweat on the brow, and rain in the streets that we hope doesn’t run acrid and acid and destroy all the beauty that’s been revealed. Nowadays, we have to dream of different things. We need new catchphrases. I’d like to think Song of the Earth contains several of them.
Apocalypse is a phase / It’s hope that saves the day / Least that’s how I pray / And from hope words to deeds.
Song of the Earth was released on New Amsterdam/Nonesuch (North America) and Transgressive (United Kingdom) on April 4.
Alec Hanley Bemis is a writer, creative producer, and founder of independent music ventures Brassland, OTH Songs, and the AHB’s Goodies mixtape delivery service on Substack.
*A musical technique where two or more voices or instruments alternate notes, chords, or short phrases—splitting a single melodic line between them so that it sounds like one continuous but interrupted flow.