LANDSCAPE MODE

Dirty Projectors' symphony for a burning world.

- BY ANNA WIENER

David Longstreth describes his new album as "music that feels like the natural world."

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?”