Gabriel Kahane's latest musical experiment is going offline
A review of 'Magnificent Bird' and his City Winery Boston appearance
Photo by Ross Edmond
Singer-composer Gabriel Kahane is an open book, and in more than one sense: his performances, interspersed with personal monologues, have a literary feel to them. Some prepared, some off the cuff: musing on his life, his work, but of particular note, a more-than-mild damnation of the internet and social media. Not for nothing, his first full album, Craigslistlieder, was carefully constructed (and very funny) art music which drew lyrics from internet personal ads—one “Neurotic and Lonely” remains a fan favorite. But these days, his relationship with the internet is more complicated—which is, to say, he has more or less given it up. The record he is performing when I see him at City Winery in Boston prior to this review is his latest, Magnificent Bird, which was written after a year-long hiatus from the web.
Yet Kahane’s body of work may owe some strange debt to the internet, if not its trappings. Besides the tunes inspired by Craigslist (arguably a primitive form of social media), he once embraced the memetic nature of the digital age wholeheartedly by setting a number of absurd celebrity tweets to music, to much acclaim. This is not to say there’s anything undemanding about that work, which remains serious in form even as it jests. Part of the appeal of Craigslistlieder and his similar works was the juxtaposition of the subject matter and the intricately designed shapes and resolutions of his music, which draws on a deep well of classical, jazz, and pop language. Now the maturing artist has shifted his attention to what he sees as an analog solution to our pervasive, and arguably unhealthy obsession with the internet: real-life community.
One manifestation of this commitment to community is his welcoming of collaborator (and opener of his Boston date) Carla Kihlstedt, who happens to call nearby Cape Cod her home. For 45 minutes, she keeps the audience rapt, her voice and violin morphing into all manners of emotional reverie: a haunted whisper, a bellicose cry, an enigmatic discord. One feels lucky at the chance to see Kihlstedt at work (with mechanic’s coveralls to match) and the casual familiarity between the two artists leads to a charming moment where Kahane is summoned from off stage and then promptly dispatched to the green room to collect the sheet music for her final number, a piece they perform together.
Photo by Ross Edmond
As part of a larger commission, Kihlstedt has been composing a number of short pieces to correspond to a darkly humorous book by kindred-Cape-spirit Edward Gorey, The Gashlycrumb Tinies—an anthology of alphabetically arranged, beautifully illustrated tales of children meeting their early demise. Her pieces complement that premise perfectly: concise, brutal arrangements that do the legwork of their storytelling instrumentally through the suggestive power Kihlstedt wields through precise mastery of her instrument’s nuances. The audience responds to these clever movements with knowing laughter, and Kihlstedt points out that that we might all feel a bit implicated in these (albeit fictional) deaths. In the penultimate story of Yorick, with Kahane at her side, we’re treated to what I can only describe as the most precise sonic recreation of the feeling of teetering at the edge of a tall building.
I suppose it makes sense that we’re all a bit more aware of our own mortality these days. The elephant in the room is now no stranger to us, with a death toll from the virus surpassing six million lives worldwide. The untold misery and loss on a personal level is uncountable, and loss of livelihood is no small part of that toll. The world of professional music has yet to truly rebound, and, expecting setbacks around every corner, touring acts have become numb to a cycle of constant rescheduling and strings of dates that turn into cancellations overnight. Given these circumstances, the move towards a more reflective and personal type of songwriting, in the wake of such isolation, is perhaps only natural.
For Kahane, this type of reflection means noticing the music of the everyday, like when he sings of the “complex chord of a train” (on new track “Hot Pink Raingear”) that he hears from his relatively new home in Portland, OR. A pre-pandemic escape with his family from his longtime home of NYC made that city their permanent home, after friends back East told them of the worsening situation in the contagion’s early days. On another track, “Linda & Stuart”, he recalls a phone conversation during that time with one such friend, and similarly, listening between the lines of talk, “strains to hear a few bars of the Upper East Side” in the pregnant pauses between their frank and somber analysis of the world’s dire state.
Photo by Ross Edmond
Extenuating circumstances aside, there is perhaps some inherent restlessness in the American spirit that can lead us to such drastic life changes in the first place. It certainly isn’t the troubadour's first major flirtation with destination—or its spellbound cousin, travel—as a major source of inspiration. 2018’s Book of Travelers served as perhaps his first grand musical experiment, songs inspired by an accumulation of stories gathered on a two-week cross-country train trip he took, in the wake of what he saw as growing confusion, hostility, and antipathy in the American body politic—hoping to find its antidote through an old-world manner.
Kahane added a self-exile from the internet to the mix, intending to engage with his fellow citizens in a candid way, regardless of any perceived differences. This precondition perhaps proved pivotal to his creative energy on Travelers, and thus served to animate his new “analog solution” to our society’s techno-anxiety through ongoing abstinence from the net. Yet, even when we might choose to do the modern equivalent of “turn on, tune in, drop out” by eschewing digital connection, we are still living in a computer-mediated world, by proxy. Even in his recent concert, Kahane appears to read sheet music off of a tablet, particularly for passages played presently as solo piano (and which were more densely arranged on Magnificent Bird.)
To his credit, Kahane knows and acknowledges the fragility of his self-imposed bubble, in the the album’s final, and most heart-wrenching song, “Sitting Shiva”, which follows the one exception Kahane made to his constraints: to join a Zoom call with his family to pay respects to his maternal grandmother who passed away during the pandemic. That bits and bytes might translate to some hope or tenderness is, then, not lost on him. I think there are further parallels in the accommodations to live music that resulted from this same absence of physical space. One resounding chorus heard during COVID from fans of music with disabilities is that the switch to live-streamed, remote concerts temporarily made the world of live music more accessible than it ever had been.
Thus we know that the mundane form of technological mediation can still hold wells of immense emotion, its own nuance despite its shortcomings. And not coincidentally, Kahane, in his newest evolution of sound, has even somewhat embraced electronic influence, or at least its offshoots. Synthesizers, played by Kahane and Joseph Lorge (the album’s mix engineer) feature prominently on a handful of tracks, digital delays act to smear percussive hits, and artifacted oscillators create divergent textures that weave deftly between the more traditional sounds of the record. The incongruity of this album’s production, made possible only through the ability of digital production to facilitate long-distance and asynchronous recording sessions, adds to this tension. A charitable reading of an internet-free world in which one still freely uses computers is that it is the systems which have manifested as a result of the internet which ought to be avoided. But, thinking of computation as a sort of language—a system of shared abstractions that allow meaning to be reified—and extending this metaphor, giving up the internet now is a bit like giving up the phone at the turn of the 20th century.
It’s hard to place Magnificent Bird, like many of Kahane’s previous efforts, in a specific genre. We might be tempted to look at his long list of collaborators on this record, notably singer-producer Amelia Leath of Sylvan Esso, songwriter-violinist Andrew Bird (perhaps not the “Magnificent” one in question, a nonetheless stupendous performer) and Chris Thile, the mandolinist-singer best known as a polymathic soloist and chameleonic bandleader. Pulitzer-prize winning Caroline Shaw, composer and member of the vocalist avant garde, contributes vocal arranging to the record’s standout track, “To Be American” which may also serve as the closest thing to an incarnation of the album’s thesis statement. While the string-bearing Thile and Bird pluck and strum syncopations over Kahane’s piano, warm and skipping, we’re treated to a tapestry of allusions towards shattered idealism: metaphors of a society on the brink of permanent disaster, while still clinging to comfortable denial and visions of grandeur. Over a tender bed of chords, Kahane intones his bleak chorus: “Foreclosing a grand old dream— Black motorcade running on empty, Big box and a Ponzi scheme, Drain everything, land of the plenty.” It’s Gabe at his most Kahanian, perhaps, loquacious, somewhat indirect, but still asking that you consider tragedy.
The subject matter on earlier records reveals Kahane as an adept student of history, or more specifically, what they might (in the academy) call “American Studies”. The mournful “Empire Liquor Mart”, off of 2014’s The Ambassador concerns the 1991 killing of a Black 15-year old Latasha Harlins by a liquor store clerk; the resulting lenient sentence may have contributed to the 1992 Los Angeles riots. In “To Be American”, the “black motorcade” may itself be a reference to the JFK assassination, which, for the author, wouldn’t be out of place—the title track off Ambassador told the story of the younger Kennedy’s assassination and the closing of the elegant, eponymous hotel where the act took place.
That Kahane has been so politically-minded prior to this release leaves me conflicted about the utility of his offline experiment in serving those ends, effectively doing what we (these days) call a “digital detox”. During a time in which civil rights seem to be eroding at every turn, some schools of more online-oriented activism might view it as a privilege to disconnect. In a certain light, it might even look reactionary or faddish, a wellness or self-improvement trend invoking faux spirituality. On the other hand, given the measurably positive impact the internet’s absence can have on well-being, it could be argued that it simply cannot follow that anybody can be a responsible citizen (or neighbor, or community member, or family member) at the expense of their own mental health. Besides, Kahane has proved the merit of non-digital forms of activism: 2020 saw the release of his first full-length orchestral album, emergency shelter intake form, which confronted the bureaucratic nightmare of the unhoused experience adeptly and sensitively. Still, so much conversation takes place online—in a sense, it is now where culture is made, and if not made, distributed—and thus the difficulty of positioning this record in the broader zeitgeist remains.
Days after the show, I am still intrigued by Kahane’s burgeoning conception of the internet as fundamentally antithetical to humanism—perhaps his, but all of ours? In some senses, the digital age ushered in a new version of the public square, and—so the narrative goes—political discourse became ensnared in something inherently more grotesque and messy, a permanently shifting machine that stripped nuance and made caricatures of us all. Back in concert for the first time in two years, Kahane says as much between songs, noting his own former propensity for losing time to anger, in other words, scrolling in vain. Yet, if these precepts are meant to be core to Kahane’s message, I’m not sure the music serves to illuminate that.
Furthermore, we must leave room for the possibility of healthy relationships with the internet, which, save for some catastrophic event like a solar flare, is not going anywhere. Just as previous generations of musicians found ways to work with the technology of the time (or found ways to subvert it), I suspect we have yet to see the true depth of the internet as a medium for art and music. Still, even without the more precise conceptual through-line he’s been known for, longtime listeners of Kahane will find much to adore on this album, such as the lush flute textures of the title track, or the gloomy chamber sound of “The Basement Engineer”. But if the promotion of the album follows its composer’s internet-free lead, I wonder if Kahane will make inroads with broader audiences—if that even is the goal. Ever-present throughout the record is his underlying premise, a stalwart Americanism: a choice between seeking populist truisms in the past or utopian fantasies in our future. Kahane, even in self-awareness, risks seeing it not for the false dichotomy it is, instead choosing the past in spirit, while less so in practice. Perhaps that remains the single flaw of Magnificent Bird—that given Kahane’s penchant for poetic insinuation, the result may be a work that, while not committing in principle to either extreme, also may not look our present directly in the eye.