Song of the Earth is out today!

it belongs to you now

song of the earth is out today!!

i’m so proud of this record and so happy to share it today. it took a village. it wouldn’t exist without the tremendous talents and dedicated focus of many people to whom i’m incredibly grateful.

thanks to andré de ridder. andré, your passion and dedication is the reason this piece exists. thank you for your trust as i continued rewriting it for years beyond the initial european premiere. most of all, thanks for the liquid poetry of your conducting. your temperament — that equanimity, intensity, playfulness & openness — is embodied in your performance, and forms the soil from which this album grows

vermont, 2022

thanks to felicia for being on this strange trip from the very beginning, jumping in at a moment’s notice (when kristin got COVID before the europe premiere in 2021), learning every different version of these words & melodies across three years of rewrites (!!), and truly summoning some of the most beautiful moments of the album

thanks to maia for being SO down to jump in to these parts at nine months pregnant — singing as breathwork! feel like the character you found in singing these low, low lines is both ‘divine feminine’ and kind of human-beyond-gender? for me your performances on the album will always be an emblem of this moment in our lives, becoming parents and finding our musicianship and collaboration deepen in the process

thanks to olga — swinging in from another side of this life to become the SotE MVP! your keyboard mastery, leadership in vocal rehearsals and energetic good cheer have been everything

bahia de banderas, mexico, 2019

thank you jodie landau. jodie, wherever anyone needs you to be, you’re there — and you’re the best at it. a truly all-time empathetic and generous collaborator. thank you for pointing your passion and brilliance my way, for harpsichording, masterful live percussion performance, finding overdub players, for the massive engraving work in creating the final score … and everything else …

thanks to danny reisch, the master mixer without whom this album probably would not yet be finished. danny, the wizard power of your ears and your wizard mastery of gear are matched only by your deeply ent-like patience & intuition and the — hobbitesque? — friendship & loyalty you showed me as we journeyed to mordor and back to the shire. (ok, a lord of the rings metaphor happened …)

thanks to patrick shiroishi for being my partner in wordless melody, conjuring a tone beyond language — i love your spirit and your playing so much

thanks to the guest vocalists who make the world of this ,earth-song’ bigger and more expansive and beautiful, often in just a moment’s cameo — thank you mount eerie, tim bernardes, steve lacy, anastasia coope, ayoni, portraits of tracy

taku glacier, alaska, 2020

thanks to the engineers — robbie moncrieff, philip weinrobe, james riotto, rob shelton, max lorenzen, joseph lorge, martin offik, tobias von zur gathen — and the studios — wisseloord, altamira, electric ear, sound city — with a special shout out to robby bc you are my dude!!! and to the echo chamber at altamira, which opened a portal to a whole different wavelength. (it’s funny when musicians talk that way but it’s true).

thank you to kyle thomas, whose golden hand and silvery fingers drew and painted and painted and drew again images of songs and earths until we found the one!!

thanks to s t a r g a z e, who approach chamber music with the rare egalitarian good humor often associated with (but rarely actually encountered in?) a rock band. maaike, i hear you in that flute solo in ,twin aspens,’ and daniel, the clarinet solo in ,at home’ is all you. caiman, i see you raise your eyebrows, ears and chin in sensitive attention every time that low double bass pedal drops! ramón & gyorgy, your willingness to carve a path through dense charts shines in the vivid colors of the percussion. vitalii, i can tell you now that didn’t actually think the raindrops in ,opposable thumb’ were actually playable until i heard you draw them flawlessly and expressively into the room on the very first run-through! aghhh, there are too many but — roman, you are the soul of the horn …

vermont, 2024

thanks to the institutional and industry partners — the barbican in london and the hamburg elbphilharmonie for commissioning the original piece and presenting early versions of it during late-COVID. thanks to the record labels — the legendary nonesuch and the passionate upstarts transgressive and new amsterdam — for being such great partners in bringing this music to the whole wide world.

thanks to david newgarden and jake abrams. david, thank you for believing in me and pushing me to present the boldest, fullest, truest version of everything. jake thank you for making a thousand small things happen (at once). thanks to teresa and alma, without whom i couldn’t have written the first note of this music, and to whom song of the earth is dedicated.

czech countryside, 2024

and thank you for listening. whether you got here yesterday or twenty years ago — thank you for sharing the light of your attention with me, and with us, for a moment.

yours, dave