Dirty Projectors Return to Austin for Special Symphonic Collaboration 

David Longstreth’s compositions reach toward a beyond that few musicians dare to explore – a place of unashamed, grandiose singularity. 

Dirty Projectors’ David Longstreth Credit: Matthew Reamer

As the founder and lead vocalist of experimental art pop outfit Dirty Projectors, the millennial indie darling has long shown an affinity for the intricate, layered compositions of orchestral music. In fact, you could view the band’s work as orchestral ideas translated into ethereal vocal harmonies, unsettled percussion, and unorthodox guitar riffs. Strings, winds, and brass have always peeked through Longstreth’s songs, but the former Yale University music major’s classical impulses were fully made manifest in the 2025 Dirty Projectors project, Song of the Earth. 

Recorded with Berlin-based chamber orchestra s t a r g a z e, the album is a full-on orchestral work, thematically encompassing Longstreth’s reverence for the natural world. The hourlong piece of concert music ebbs and flows through melodies both beautiful and strange, utilizing fluid instrumentation and vocals to create a world befitting the Dirty Projectors universe.

“It’s a wild one,” Longstreth tells the Chronicle. “I felt a sense of freedom from the conscious, unarticulated rules that I had come to be bound by as a songwriter.”

Like most of his previous work, Song of the Earth just escapes the grasp of simplification, but for the sake of the interview, he tries his hand at describing the character of the album.

“[It’s] like an old, big, gnarled tree with huge roots and a big trunk that’s sort of scarred by fire and pestilence [but] is big and strong anyway,” he says.

That old, gnarled tree will be brought to life this Thursday at the Long Center, where the Projectors – Longstreth and vocalists Felicia Douglass, Maia Friedman, and Olga Bell – will perform the album in full, for only the second time, with help from the Austin Symphony Orchestra. It’s a big jump from Longstreth’s early Austin performances; a lonely 2005 SXSW laptop DJ set at the Hideout Theatre is still seared into the musician’s mind. 

“I remember standing outside on the sidewalk after the show and looking up at the big sky, this sort of neon blue color and having the sense of a really big, wide, open world,” he recalls. 

The artist spoke with orchestras across the country in planning the performance, but Austin’s was the most determined to make it happen. 

“A lot of rock music is relatively simple, but the Dirty Projectors [aren’t] simple at all,” says Justus Zimmerman, Austin Symphony Orchestra’s CEO. “[They] basically demand the level of musicianship that we’re able to offer as a professional orchestra.”

“Austin is a city that has been there for me in moments of change or evolution in my career,” Longstreth adds. “It feels really right to do this here.”

The Projectors have been working with longtime Austin Symphony music director/conductor Peter Bay to put the pieces of the performance together. The rehearsal process is quite a bit more complex than the average Dirty Projectors show, with 10 times the musicians to now account for.

“It’s normal for classical musicians to put things together this way, but for us, [this] feels like a little bit of a high-wire act,” Longstreth says.

Still, all the effort is worth it for the purpose of experiencing that soul-assuring connection with one’s surroundings only music can invoke. With the performance, the band intends to turn the Long Center into one shared body.

“It will be a bunch of friends and strangers all sort of holding their breath and breathing together through the hour of the music,” Longstreth promises.

Dirty Projectors and the Austin Symphony Orchestra present Song of the Earth on Thursday, April 16, at the Long Center.

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