Gabriel Kahane | composer
Over the last dozen years, Gabriel Kahane has often approached his work from the vantage point of an observer. He’s written songs about historical figures, action movie villains, and any number of buildings (c.f. 2014's The Ambassador, a love letter to the shadowy underbelly of Los Angeles). He’s set celebrity tweets to music—including Mitt Romney’s paean to the humble hot dog—and tackled inequality through the lens of housing issues, resulting in 2018's emergency shelter intake form, commissioned and premiered by the Oregon Symphony, where Kahane serves as Creative Chair. But now, for the first time since 2011's Where are the Arms, he’s telling his own story.
With Magnificent Bird, his second album for Nonesuch Records, Kahane brings to life a trunk of songs written in self-imposed isolation—a full year off the internet—with the help of a dozen colleagues whose long-distance contributions were made possible, paradoxically, through the very technology he had shunned.
In October 2020—the final month of his digital hiatus, and a resolutely chaotic period in the United States—he set out to write a song every day. “I wanted to create something like an aural brain scan at the end of this experiment,” he explains, “and to give myself permission to write about small things, rather than trying to distill the enormity of the moment into grand statements.”
Not only that: Kahane’s daily practice, with its attendant stream-of-consciousness, gives us a window into a mercurial mind associating freely.
