Gabriel Kahane Interview: Heirloom, Songwriting, and Creative Practice
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Gabriel Kahane:
What would this character be feeling on a particular day, but what do they do when they're feeling bad? How do they soothe themself? How do they self-medicate? Where do they go? What music do they listen to? What do they eat? What do they wear? Just really sort of thinking about every possible variable in world building. And so I think that there is ... When you do, whether you call it method acting or something else, but you're sort of building a world around a character, I think the same thing is very much the case in songwriting. So very often for me, songs begin with a free write in which I'm trying to build a world around a character. And once you've built that world around the character, then you can start to try to distill into rhyming couplets.
Leah Roseman:
Hi, you’re listening to Conversations with Musicians, with Leah Roseman, which I hope inspires you through the personal stories of a fascinating diversity of musical guests. I’m honoured to bring to you this in-depth conversation with the brilliant musician, writer, composer and storyteller Gabriel Kahane as my first episode of Season 6 of this podcast. You’ll be hearing many short clips from several of his albums including his piano concerto Heirloom, written for his father Jeffrey Kahane. This is a wide-ranging interview and you’ll hear about Gabriel’s upcoming book project, the impact of his early theatre training, how learning to conduct is helping him as a composer, and reflections from his hiatus from the internet and social media. Fans who love Book of Travelers and Magnificent Bird will hear clips and insights from those projects and we also got into his work as an artist-citizen in his large-scale work “emergency shelter intake form” commissioned by the Oregon Symphony about homelessness and the housing crisis. The track and album names are specified in the timestamps and everything is linked in the show notes. Like all my episodes, you can watch this on my YouTube channel or listen to the podcast and I’ve also linked the transcript.It’s a joy to bring these inspiring episodes to you, and I do all the many jobs of research, production and publicity. Have a look at the show notes of this episode, where you’ll find all the links, including different ways to support this podcast!
Leah Roseman:
Thanks for joining me here today, Gabriel.
Gabriel Kahane:
Of course. It's my pleasure.
Leah Roseman:
So many people love your songs, know what you're about, but some people listening won't actually know who you are. And I think you have such exciting new projects, but to put those in perspective, it would be good to look at some of your older things. And you had suggested maybe we could include clips of really some of your most incredible songs that I agree they resonated with me super strongly. So maybe we could talk about, if we could go back to Book of Travelers actually.
Gabriel Kahane:
Sure, absolutely.
Leah Roseman:
So can you tell us what that trip was and what got that project going?
Gabriel Kahane:
Yeah. So back in 2016, as the US presidential election was in its final phase, that campaign, I was increasingly aware of how much emotional energy I was spending trying not to fall into this sort of us versus them binary of sort of reducing half of the country to an ideological monolith. And I felt that I was being fed a narrative both on social media, sort of combustible narrative there, as well as in legacy media in which the country had been sort of cleaved neatly into these two ideologically warring camps. And I wanted to bypass that. And so a few weeks before the election, I bought a series of train tickets that would take me on a circuitous route of the continental US, about 9,000 miles, which I think is about 14,000 kilometers.
Gabriel Kahane:
And the plan was to leave the morning after the election. Now, of course, I, like so many other Americans, assumed that the election was going to go one way and then it went the other. And that really transformed the character of that trip. I had sort of thought that I was going to be going on what I described as an empathy tour of the vanquished, and then it turned out to be something altogether different. And so over the course of 13 days, I talked to somewhere north of a hundred people, primarily in the dining cars of Amtrak trains and listened to their stories. And I should mention that at the time, I didn't know that these conversations were going to become a part of an album. I was working on a new record that was sort of more broadly about travel and I kept a pretty meticulous diary while I was on the trip and then I came home and in some cases weeks later and in other cases, months later, I wrote songs both about my own experience and about the people that I met on the train.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Actually, on this album, you have this song Baedeker, and I was wondering if it referred to your, like you're inspired by the American Guide series for another project years earlier, the Great Depression.
Gabriel Kahane:
Yeah, sort of yes and no. I think you're referring to this earlier piece called Gabriel's Guide to the 48 States, which I wrote for Orpheus Chamber Orchestra back in 2013. For listeners who are unfamiliar, the American Guide Series was a series of travel guides created during the Great Depression by the Federal Writers Project, which was an arm of the WPA, which sought to put people back to work during an episode of mass unemployment. And the architects of the American Guide Series had been inspired by the Baedeker Railway Guide Series, which is a German company that still exists to this day, that had created travel guides for rail passengers. But now in the 30s, this was sort of the dawn of the auto era. And so they sought to create a new set of guidebooks for people who were traveling by car. And the idea was that maybe this would both stimulate tourism, but at the same time, it was an opportunity to sort of capture regional history and regional character.
Gabriel Kahane:
The song Baedeker from Book of Travelers, it's only, I guess, a sort of oblique connection. I had actually just bought a 1908 Baedeker guide on eBay a few weeks before I was taking my trip. I also should mention, I took this trip totally off the grid. I didn't bring my cell phone by design because I really wanted to be interacting with people without the mediation of technology. And so it was very analog and I found this beautiful guidebook. I don't remember what led me to that guidebook, but I brought it with me and it has these gorgeous maps that expand from these tiny pages. It's a pocket size guidebook, but the maps, even though they're 110 years old, were incredibly well preserved and sometimes late at night on the train, I would take out these maps and try to sort of reconcile in my mind the scale of what I saw on the map with what I saw beyond the window of the train.
Gabriel Kahane:
And that's sort of where this song came from. (clip of Baedeker from Book of Travelers)
Leah Roseman:
It's such an incredible collection of songs. I'm curious, I often ask this of people, if you perform it in the same order as the album, generally.
Gabriel Kahane:
Oh, it's a great question. No, it's interesting as someone who moves between a lot of different music spaces, working with orchestras, working with string quartets, playing solo, a lot of my catalog, particularly the song catalog is very modular of all these different versions. There's actually, there's an orchestral suite called Pattern of the Rail, which I don't know, maybe I can bring that to Canada someday, where I've taken six of those songs and split them out into pairs with little connective tissue, and it sort of plays almost like a concerto where it's in three movements and the order of that is totally different than what appears on the album. And then when I do the piece as a whole, there's a sort of theater piece version. The order is totally different. And in fact, November, the opening song is at the very end of the stage piece.
Gabriel Kahane:
It sort of is the concluding open-ended question and the final line of that song being, could a train be an escape? And rather than having that as the sort of animating hypothesis of the record, I leave the listener with that at the end of the piece. (clip November from Book of Travelers)
Gabriel Kahane:
And then very often I will do pairs of these songs excerpted in the context of doing other things in my catalog, because obviously I've written a lot of songs since then. This record came out in 2018, but it does seem to be a grower, as they say. It's a record that seems to keep finding listeners.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Yeah. I was about to say November is such an amazing opener.
Gabriel Kahane:
Oh, thank you. I'm fond of that song. Yeah. I mean, I think for me, that record was a sort of a transformational moment in my creative life because it was really back to basics. The whole record is just voice and piano, no overdubs. My longtime beloved collaborator, Joseph Lorge, who recorded and mixed that album, he really helped to give it some astonishing character through the way that the piano is treated and the way the voice is treated, but everything is performed live. And I think that intimacy of the album of just the voice and the piano and having to think of the piano orchestrally. In the past, I had made albums with a lot of strings and brass and bass and drums and so on and so forth. And then I would go on tour solo and have to kind of reverse engineer these massive arrangements back to playing by myself.
Gabriel Kahane:
With Book of Travelers, the idea was, well, I'm just going to think from the outset of the piano in an orchestral way. And so each of these songs has to be arranged in this kind of lapidary way. So sometimes that involved actually omitting things to start from an even sparser place so that things could then be added in. I think sometimes we often think of arranging as an additive process, but sometimes it actually can be a subtractive process. If you're dealing with only one instrument and you know, well, this is the maximum texture that I'm going to achieve say in the third verse, then I'd better start from a sparser place here. So that's one of the kind of great pleasures for me. And in a music culture that often venerates things that are massively produced, it's sort of funny to me that the album of mine that really, really kind of broke through in a way or broke through in a different way was this album that's unbelievably sparse.
Leah Roseman:
It's interesting you mentioned orchestration. Your recent essay about orchestration where you talk about your tune "Where Are the Arms", it was really interesting for me to read, especially as someone who plays a lot of arrangements as an orchestral musician. We do play a lot of great arrangements, but too often we're thinking everyone's playing all the time. This isn't good.
Gabriel Kahane:
Yeah. There's a really interesting psychological challenge, I think, with orchestral arrangements of popular song. And I think some of that has to do with more sensitive arrangers, there's this fear of not wanting the players to be bored. But the flip side of that is that I think if you were to poll a bunch of orchestral musicians, and I will ask this question back to you, I mean, I think you'd rather play fewer notes and have everyone really count than be playing all the time.
Leah Roseman:
Absolutely. Yeah.
Gabriel Kahane:
Yeah. I mean, I think it's like in the slow movement of the Ravel Piano Concerto, the trombone plays two notes, but they're the right two notes. My father, Jeffrey Kahane, pianist and conductor, he talks about that as sort of evidence that orchestration can be extremely disciplined in terms of how you deploy forces. And I think that the challenge for song arrangement is that you want to support the song, everything you put into the chart, you want to make sure that it's supporting the voice and supporting what's happening narratively and emotionally and psychologically in the song. And then at the same time, you don't want it to be overstuffed and you want to make sure that the ear is not drawn. You want the player to be engaged, but you want the ear of the listener not to be drawn away from the vocal. And I think that's sort of the challenge.
Gabriel Kahane:
And the problem with everyone playing all the time is that when a texture is present throughout, it ceases to add a color because the color just becomes constant in our ear. So yeah, I mean, I think in that essay, I referred to the dark art of arranging, and I think it is kind of a dark art.
Leah Roseman:
Back to the Book of Travelers, the very first time I heard this, I was on a long overnight flight and I listened to the whole thing through. It was quite an experience. And actually the Model Trains really stayed with me. So is that a true story that someone shared with you?
Gabriel Kahane:
I'm going to plead the fifth on that one.
Leah Roseman:
Okay.
Gabriel Kahane:
That's a song that for various reasons, that's the one song that I don't talk about on the record. I think that song can mean to people what they want it to mean. If you want to play it, that's totally fine.That's the one song that I tend to not talk about. (clip of Model Trains from Book of Travelers)
Leah Roseman:
There must have been so many more stories than you wrote songs for from that incredible trip. Has it generated more creative output since that time?
Gabriel Kahane:
I've done a fair amount of writing, like prose writing about my train trip and still at some point might aspire to write some kind of long form piece about it. And yes, there were so many stories left on the cutting room floor. And there were also songs that I wrote that didn't make it onto the album. There were some sort of funnier songs rooted in some very sort of unexpectedly silly encounters that I had. I met two sisters who played in a family band and were engaged in this like unbelievably competitive game of Scrabble, which they asked me to adjudicate at one point. And so I wrote a song about them that didn't make it. There's actually a song that's in the stage piece called Trophy Longhorns that is released as a single that's available online, but it's not on the album about the sort of late in life romance between Esther and Earl, these two folks who I met on, I think it was on the Southwest Chief coming back from LA towards Chicago. And they had been honeymooning in the Grand Canyon and they were both widowed and had met each other online on match.com. And so I wrote a song about their romance, the sort of punchline of which is that each of them ... Earl was a cowboy and Esther was sort of fascinated as a Northerner by cowboys and they both had trophy Longhorns in their respective homes. And when they finally moved in together, they flipped a coin to decide whose trophy Longhorns would be hung above the bed. So yeah, there were a lot of other stories.
Leah Roseman:
Let's get into your piano concerto Heirloom.
Gabriel Kahane:
Sure.
Leah Roseman:
It's a recent release and I'm curious, do you think a lot of people who go to your song concerts, for a better word, are familiar with your more classical side?
Gabriel Kahane:
Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, I think of my audience is sort of drawn from a lot of different music spaces. There are people who come from the folk world, people who come from the more new music concert music world. There are people who come from the improvised music space. It's sort of like a big tent, a big tent audience, although a niche audience, but comes from a lot of different places. And I can see to a certain extent in just who's, because I maintain my Bandcamp store online, I can see who's ordering the new record. And I think it's a subset of the folks who listen to my singer-songwriter music.
Gabriel Kahane:
I suspect there are still a lot of people who don't know that it's out because the press landscape is so decimated compared to what it was 10 years ago. 10 years ago or 11 years ago, I put out a record and it got 50 reviews and Heirloom has been out for, I guess, almost two months and there's been one review so far. It was a very nice one in Gramophone, but it's a really, really different landscape. And as much as I can complain, it's a much more serious state of affairs for journalists because they don't have jobs. That's why there are no reviews because so many press outlets have decided that criticism is not profitable, which is a real tragedy because I think criticism is a great art unto itself. So I think that is unquestionably hobbling the ways in which music is disseminated and heard.
Gabriel Kahane:
And as much as you can sort of assume that someone gets your newsletter or sees your Instagram post, they need reinforcement from elsewhere, they need reminders, but there's definitely some overlap in terms of those worlds. I mean, I think that the people who are drawn to my songwriting are in some cases drawn to it for the musical language. And there is certainly an overlap, there's a deliberate overlap between the language of my songs and the language of that piano concerto. (clip of beginning of first movement of Heirloom)
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. So your dad, wonderful pianist and conductor. Can you tell us a little bit about him? And you must have, I mean, as close as you guys are, I mean, you've been touring with this concerto recently, spending more time together that way.
Gabriel Kahane:
Yeah. So my father is named Jeffrey Kahane. He and my mom met when they were 10 at summer camp in Northern California, and they actually had a sort of tweenage romance, broke up, got back together in their late teens. They were married when they were 22, and I was born when they were both 24. And eerily, my father, when he was 12, wrote my mom a letter saying, "I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I think we should get married when we're 22, have a child when we're 25 and go around the world playing music." And that's very nearly what happened. My mom ended up a psychologist and she's a very fine amateur singer, but ended up moving into psychology after taking a degree in music. And I live very much at the intersection of who my parents are. My father is ... To call him an autodidact as an understatement, this is a guy who dropped out of high school, went to conservatory and speaks well more than half a dozen modern languages conversationally.
Gabriel Kahane:
And then in his 40s started studying Latin and Greek and is now very nearly finished in his late 60s with a PhD in Classics. So he's a very, very serious thinker and someone who thinks really deeply about the relationship between music and ethics. And that's something that I think has been passed down. And also, as a child, he was really torn between his love of folk music. He and my mom played in bands together. This is something I talk about in the program note for the concerto. And so he loved folk music, but he also was really passionate about the classical repertoire and longed to find a way to sort of bring them together at a time when there weren't particularly obvious ways of doing that. Of course, now in 2025, it's commonplace to hear a string quartet and a singer-songwriter on the same program.
Gabriel Kahane:
And so I think there's a way in which my whole path is a little bit the ... Someone I dated once said that there's this sort of Jungian pop quiz where you ask someone what the unlived lives of their parents are, and whatever your answer to that is, is what you are, that you sort of manifest as a child, the unlived lives of your parents. And there's a way in which, in a kind of quite literal way, I feel like I've ended up doing that and sort of bridging these gaps between the concert music world and popular music. And that's very much, that's a big part of what's happening in this concerto is sort of trying to bring vernacular music in a really explicit way back into the concert hall and not just borrowed vernacular music, but my own. So drawing on my own sort of song materials, either abandoned or songs that have been released and repurposing them for the concert hall.
Gabriel Kahane:
And some of that grew out of this observation that my dad had made right around the time that I was starting to work on the piece. He had said in a joint interview that we were doing, someone had asked, "What's so great about the Gershwin Piano Concerto?" And he said, "The miracle of the Gershwin Piano Concerto is that it sounds like Gershwin." And what he meant by that was that in spite of Gershwin's incredible reverence for his peers in the concert music world and his feeling of imposter syndrome, when he was commissioned to write a piano concerto, he did not try to sound like Mahler or Strauss or Schoenberg. He sounds like Gershwin. And I was sort of asking myself, why since the Concerto in F, have we not had a piece? I mean, I guess in a way you could say the Copland clarinet concerto feels somewhat like a vernacular concerto, but not to the extent that the Gershwin Concerto in F does.
Gabriel Kahane:
Heirloom is really an attempt to kind of plant a flag for the idea that as much as concert music spaces and gatekeepers are less snobby than they once were, there's still a kind of like thumbing of the nose at new music that is really explicitly rooted in the vernacular, even as we continue to program Symphonic Dances from West Side Story all the time and Gershwin Concerto in F all the time and Rhapsody and Blue, it's sort of like, "Well, we're only interested in concert music that uses the vernacular that's 100 years old or 70 years old." So that's kind of the hope with this piece is to kind of make a case for the vernacular in the concert hall. (clip of first movement "Guitars in the Attic" Heirloom piano concerto)
Leah Roseman:
It's really a great piece of music and I really love the orchestration on it. It kind of has this exciting sizzle to it, really a lot of interest.
Gabriel Kahane:
Thank you.
Leah Roseman:
"Where Are the Arms", the song
Gabriel Kahane:
Oh, sure. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
I was curious, I mean, yeah, could you just speak about the very minimalist lyrics and that relationship of the song to the concerto?
Gabriel Kahane:
Yeah. So when I was working on Heirloom, I wanted to write this sort of ververnacular concerto rooted in song and the first movement, the materials, even though it's this kind of big 15 minute arc, the first 11 minutes are all drawn from two really simple ideas, one from a song that was never released, which I sort of built out into the big first theme. And then the other theme comes from the sort of chorale tune that then shows up in the coda, which is the song, Where Are The Arms? And Where are the Arms is the title track of my second album, which came out in 2011. And I think the reason that I drew from that song is that it contains within it this sort of cross-pollination where that song, even though on the original recording, it's electric guitars and bass and voice, it has a kind of Germanic chorale tune feeling.
Gabriel Kahane:
So already you have this exchange of musical DNA of my love of Schubert and Schumann. I think if you just sit at the piano and play those chords, it feels like it's that, or it could even be an even earlier Lutheran chorale tune over which I sing this ... It's basically like a pep talk. It's a breakup song. It's a, "Okay kid, it's time to get over this heartbreak." I don't think I overthought it tremendously, but I just had this idea that, "Oh, well, maybe there's more juice to squeeze out of this lemon musically." So the idea is that it first appears a couple minutes into the first movement, the horn plays the sort of chorale tune, but it's re-harmonized in this kind of dark chromatic way. The English horn, I think in the program note, I describe it as a wayward English horn that sort of won't behave harmonically.
Gabriel Kahane:
And then finally in the coda, you have this very ethereal, all very, very high register string harmonics and woodwinds playing kind of at the upper extremes of their registers. And then the piano finally enters with the melody on top of this chorale tune. And then after the sort of first expression of the melody, it gets reharmonized yet again. And these sort of darker harmonies, more chromatic harmonies start to express themselves. So I guess it's less dealing with the lyric and more really just kind of wrestling with this harmonic material and melodic material and this sort of question of like, how does the vernacular relate to the concert realm? And how, for Schubert, when he took a song and parlayed it into a string quartet, the harmonic languages, maybe the harmonic language got a little bit more out there, but still the relationship between song and concert music in the 19th century, it's basically one language, but when you want to use the vernacular in concert music in 2025, if you just use purely diatonic harmonies, it sounds kind of retro. It sounds a little bit neoclassical, neo-romantic. So what I'm trying to push myself to do, the sort of challenge is how to kind of maintain the emotional quality of this simple music, but push it harmonically, rhythmically in such a way that it feels like it belongs in the concert hall. (clip of orchestrated version of "Where Are the Arms" from the Heirloom album)
Leah Roseman:
You succeeded very much.
Gabriel Kahane:
Oh, well, thank you.
Leah Roseman:
And the last movement dedicated to your daughter, it's this effervescent piece. Do you want to speak to the title? It's really a nice
Gabriel Kahane:
Story. Oh, sure. Yeah. So each of the movements of Heirloom is, as the title suggests, it's a piece about inheritance. And the first movement, which is called Guitars in the Attic, sort of explores my musical inheritance from my parents. The second movement, which is called My Grandmother Knew Alban Berg, is about my grandmother's flight from Nazi Germany in 1939 and arriving in Los Angeles later that year, and sort of wrestling with what to do with the German music and literature that she loved that had been co-opted by the Third Reich. So the second movement then being sort of about intergenerational memory.(clip 2nd movement “My Grandmother Knew Alban Berg” Heirloom)
Gabriel Kahane:
The last movement deals with what we pass down to our children. And when they're very small, as my daughter was, when I was writing this piece, we sort of look at our child and we sort of see aspects of ourselves in them, but we don't know who they're going to become. And that title, "Vera's Chicken -Powered Transit Machine", refers to this diaper box that my wife had turned into a vehicle when we were stuck in Portland, Oregon at the beginning of the pandemic, and our kid had none of her toys. And so we made this car for her that she scooted around on the cement floor of this Airbnb where we were staying while we were waiting to figure out what we were going to do, stuck across the country. And this also coincided with her beginning to eat solid food, and she was very, very enamored of chicken, and it was like the only thing she would eat. So that is where "Vera's Chicken-Powered Transit Machine", which was written on the diaper box. That's where that title and the energy of that piece came from. (clip 3rd movement “VERA’S CHICKEN-POWERED TRANSIT MACHINE”, Heirloom piano concerto)
Leah Roseman:
In Canada, we had restrictions between provinces with travel. Did you have that as well in the States?
Gabriel Kahane:
Not, I think very briefly at the very beginning, there was maybe an attempt to ... Yeah, I seem to remember there was some stuff about interstate travel in the Northeast, particularly when New York was a hotbed of the virus, but I actually flew out to Portland with my wife and daughter on March 8th, 2020, which was sort of just before ... The writing was kind of on the wall and that was actually why my wife who's in healthcare came with me because she saw this was not going to be a brief thing and she was worried that I might get stuck out there. I was doing some work with the Oregon Symphony and then sure enough, the pandemic hit, lockdown began and I saw the rest of my season as everyone else's that got canceled in the matter of days. And weirdly, I had been in Europe a few weeks before and was sort of dancing around the country or rather dancing around the continent as I remember vividly sitting in a hotel room in Amsterdam watching this hotel keeper in a small town in Italy talk about the quarantine that was happening there and thinking, "Oh, this is not good." And then yeah, a matter of weeks later, we found ourselves in Portland and our friends in New York started calling and said, "Things are really scary, don't come back if you don't have to.
Gabriel Kahane:
And then the sort of capstone of this is that at the time that the pandemic hit, I was four months into a year long hiatus from the internet, but maybe I'm getting ahead of our conversation.
Leah Roseman:
No, go there.
Gabriel Kahane:
Yeah. My most recent album as a singer-songwriter, Magnificent Bird, is sort of a chronicle of the final month of this year long hiatus from the internet that I began in November of 2019. And in a way, this kind of connects back to Book of Travelers where having taken that trip off the grid without my phone, I recognized what a sort of profound psychic and spiritual shift that was to just be returning to engaging with people the way that we did before we had smartphones. And I have a pretty vivid memory of being somewhere in the desert of the American Southwest during that train trip in 2016, thinking, "I should really ditch my phone for more than two weeks and gradually formulated this plan to spend an entire year away from the internet as a way of better understanding the ways in which the internet is ... Social media in particular was sort of creating a deeper sense of polarization.
Gabriel Kahane:
I recently read a book by the sociologist, Chris Bale, who founded the polarization lab at Duke University in North Carolina called Breaking the Social Media Prism, and he spent his entire career basically studying why people hate each other, why neighbors grow to hate each other. And one of the big findings of that book is that one, we're not actually more polarized on the issues than we were 30 or 40 years ago, at least in the US, but rather we have these technologies that create a false sense of polarization and that because the most extreme voices are one, the ones that participate the most, and two, the ones that are amplified the most algorithmically, and three, that people who have more nuanced views tend not to speak up because they fear being attacked by the extreme ends of the spectrum. We end up with this sense of a kind of binary.
Gabriel Kahane:
So that was one aspect of this desire to leave the internet for a year. And I specifically chose bookends of these election days, election day 2019 and election day 2020, because I wanted to know what it would feel like to observe a really fractious election cycle just through print media and the radio rather than through the digital realm. But then there were all these other questions more broadly about surveillance capitalism and the way that convenience in so many instances masks these debts that are accruing. Naomi Klein, the great leftist thinker, published a book a couple years ago called Doppelganger. I don't know if that crossed your desk, but she has this idea of the shadow lands that there's all of this sort of invisible labor that makes possible our lives of convenience and efficiency. And the book hadn't been written at the time that I took this year offline, but she sort of offers a vocabulary that really sort of informs some of the things that I was trying to investigate, which is like, when we buy something with a single click online, one, the convenience of it compels us to buy things we don't need because it's so easy to do and the manufacturer of these things we don't need creates more emissions that further poison the planet.
Gabriel Kahane:
And at the same time, this is an observation that my wife made as much as we talk about spaces like social media creating a sense of polarization, there's also just the fact that as commerce has moved online, we have fewer and fewer opportunities to just interact with people and that these exchanges that were once an opportunity to sort of see someone, to touch someone that were not freighted with ideology, whether it was like buying a bagel or a pair of shoes have just been vacuumed out of our lives. And that also leads us into this way of seeing the world in more abstract and ideological terms. So I spent this year offline, unexpectedly ended up in Portland, Oregon, four months into it, which made the experience much, much more isolated and monastic than what I had intended. I thought I was going to be living in New York, that I'd be going to concerts, seeing friends, having meals, but ended up not only across the country, but also in the middle of a lockdown.
Gabriel Kahane:
And so it became a rather quiet, spiritual time from which to observe this very, very chaotic moment. And then in the final month of that year, October 2020, I wrote a song every day as a way of trying to understand where I was and from those 30 songs made this record called Magnificent Bird.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Thanks for that. Yeah. Some of what you were just talking about resonated with a recent episode of mine with sound scholar Mack Hagood. I think I'll link that one in the linked episodes for people. So this album though, it has like, it's not just you and piano. I mean, you have so many great musicians, a lot of your friends, Pekka Kuusisto, Caroline Shaw, Andrew Bird, Natalie Joachim, Chris Thiele, lots of other great people, but that was done remotely?
Gabriel Kahane:
Everything was done remotely. And I will say I got into sort of a tiff with the sort of legendary music executive, Bob Hurwitz, was the longtime president of Nonesuch Records, who had at that point mostly stepped down, but he was still sort of shepherding certain projects he had brought me to the label. And when he heard the original demos of all 30 songs, he had this very, very visceral response to it, that this was sort of like my life's work. And I think he had hoped that I would preserve that kind of diaristic quality. And I kind of fought with him. And ultimately, one of the beautiful things about Nonesuch Records is that the artist decides. They really, in almost every case, they capitulate to what the artist wants. I later came to think that he was sort of right, and I did actually go back and rerecord a lot of those songs in solo versions that are not released.
Gabriel Kahane:
I'm very fond of the album that I made, but I do hear how much it was made remotely. I think you sort of have the sense of ... There's just a different energy when things are performed live in a room, and I think it's really, really tough to capture that when everyone is far flung. That being said, having been so deeply isolated, it was amazing to reconnect with my friends that way. And I remember in particular the conversation I had with Caroline Shaw about the background vocals that she recorded for the song To Be American and one, how moved I was when I opened up those stems and listened to what she had done. But we had also gotten into this funny email correspondence because there's a lyric, it says, "In high school, I sang in the choir with all the Mormons from Rohnert Park. Now all their houses are on fire, strange glow of Oxblood in the dark." And I asked Caroline if she could sort of bring that choir to life and she wrote me this email that accompanied the stems where she sort of almost wrote this short story about the singers that she had invented. And when I opened up the file, opened up the session, she had named all of the singers. There was like eight different singers with made up names and she had sort of created these persona for all of these fictional singers. And that was, it was both really moving to hear what she did on the one hand, and then two, to sort of have this correspondence. (clip of To Be American from Magnificent Bird)
Gabriel Kahane:
So there were things about it that were really, really special. And I suppose in a way, it being a record about isolation, it's appropriate that it was made on three continents and with, or maybe it's just two continents, many countries, I think three or four countries and 11 or 12 states in the US.
Leah Roseman:
Hi, just a really quick break from the episode. I wanted to let you know about some other episodes I’ve linked directly to this one with: Jean Rohe, Lawrence English, Nimrod Borenstein, Martha Redbone, Thomas Cabaniss, and Verna Gillis among so many episodes since 2021. In the show notes you’ll also find a link to sign up for my newsletter, where you’ll get exclusive information about upcoming guests, a link for my Ko-fi page to support this project directly, where you can buy me one coffee, or every month, and my podcast merchandise store with a design commissioned from artist Steffi Kelly. You can also review this podcast, share it with your friends, and follow on your podcast app, YouTube, and social media. All this helps spread the word! Thanks.
Leah Roseman:
And the last track on this album, Sit Shiva, this late life romance, was that a real story with your grandmother?
Gabriel Kahane:
Yeah, that's the story of my grandmother and her husband, Raymond. They had ... Yeah, I mean, everything basically more or less is true. They met just before Raymond was sent off to fight in World War II at Columbia University on the Upper West Side. And for reasons I won't get into here that are sort of Byzantine, they completely fell out of touch for 55 years. And then after the death of my first step-grandfather, whose name was Herb Lewis, my grandmother had a friend who said, "You should call up that guy, Raymond Shapiro." And she was living in California at the time and she called him up and flew to New York where she was from. They had lunch and he said, "I'd like to take you to dinner." And she said, "You're married, that would be untoward." And he said, "I'm prepared to leave my wife." And this was the day that they were reconnecting after decades and decades of not having seen each other.
Gabriel Kahane:
And she said, "Well, if you're prepared to leave your wife, I'll have dinner with you. " And he went home and he said, "I've met someone." And at the time they were in their 70s and there were some bumps along the way, but basically they spent 20 years happily together at the end of their lives. And she died in August of, I believe it was in August of 2020, and he basically died of a broken heart in February of 21.
Leah Roseman:
That's really, chills. Yeah.
Gabriel Kahane:
Yeah. And that song, that's one of my favorite songs that I've written, I think because you can do a lot writing from character, but when it's rooted in truth, there's another dimension, and it's a story that I'd always sort of wanted to tell in some way. And from a sort of craft standpoint, one of the things that I really enjoy about that song is that the first two verses have set up this expectation of we're in this sort of Zoom memorial, Zoom shiva, and then in the final verse, it telescopes and it collapses decades and decades of a life of two lives in a matter of a series of couplets. And so that for me on a kind of technical level is something that I really enjoy as a songwriter is kind of like pushing the bounds of what a song can contain and withstand. (clip of Sit Shiva from Magnificent Bird)
Leah Roseman:
You know, I first found out about you in terms of you being a writer, a cultural commentator. I'd read a bunch of your articles, and I'm curious, have you written a novel or are you working on anything large scale like that?
Gabriel Kahane:
Well, it's funny you should ask. I'm in the very final stages of working on a book proposal with my literary agent who I've been with for a very long time. I wrote a piece for The New Yorker online back in 2014, and she wrote to me out of the blue and said, "Someday you're going to write a book." And so I'm hoping that maybe by the time this airs, I will have sold the book. I'm actually, that's what I'm working on today, I'm on the 11th draft of the proposal. And a good part of it is sort of rooted in some of the things I've been writing about on my Substack. It's a nonfiction book. It's really sort of a book about, broadly speaking, how to be an artist in the 21st century amidst rapacious capitalism and polarization. And it sort of blends philosophy and spirituality and some political thinking. And in many ways, I'm thinking of it as kind of a manifesto. So yeah, depending on when this airs, maybe I will have sold the book. We'll see. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
I'm not surprised by this and I really look forward to reading it, but I was wondering about fiction because you're such a storyteller, like short stories, novels.
Gabriel Kahane:
Yeah. I mean, it's funny, I did actually, I had been wanting to do a book project for a while just because the Substack, I still have a ... I mean, depending on how you look at it, I have a very small ... Or I have about 5,000 subscribers, which on the one hand is not very many, and on the other hand is a lot. And I have some readers who are very prominent writers who've sent me really lovely feedback. People like the National Book Award winner, Andrew Solomon and the New Yorker writer, Adam Gopnik, and also some musicians I really admire who read and regularly respond. And so it's been validating to get that kind of feedback. And I did actually early this year started on a novel that was sort of about being a touring musician. And then in the summer, I played this house concert and wrote an essay about that house concert. I don't know if you read that piece.
Leah Roseman:
I did.
Gabriel Kahane:
Yeah. Anyway, that was really sort of the germ of the nonfiction book. And I have a friend, a wonderful writer who for years had been saying, "I really think you should write a manifesto." And every three months he would text me and say, "I really think you should write a manifesto." So I've kind of set the novel aside. I mean, it's something I would love to do on the one hand. And then on the other hand, I read great fiction by contemporaries of mine and I do return to this sort of feeling of imposter syndrome where on the one hand, there's some things I do very well. And on the other, writing is really laborious for me or it sort of vacillates between being something that kind of pours out and something where I can labor over the same paragraph for two hours. And I suppose that's maybe the case for a lot of writers, but I read certain people whose prose is just so kind of effortless and I feel like my writing is more effortful.
Gabriel Kahane:
We'll see. Maybe I think the first goal, I feel really, really passionate about this nonfiction book. The proposal is already about 20,000 words and the book that I'm imagining is probably only 60,000 words. So I sort of feel like I'm going to write it no matter what at this point.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. I think all great writers, it's so much about the editing if you talk to any writers, I But in terms of being generative, you had mentioned even with Magnificent Bird, you just set yourself this task of writing a song every day, which is really a lot. And I think you have that discipline, right? If you want to do whatever, you're going to do it.
Gabriel Kahane:
Well, I think people work in so many different ways. And I had a conversation over the summer with a friend who's a prominent playwright and a mother. And she said, "Men think they need all this time to do their creative work. They think they need eight hours a day." And she said, "When you're a woman and when you're a mother, you do the work when you can. " And she was talking about how she writes in these tiny little fragments of the day and sometimes doesn't write for two months and then has a sort of burst of creative energy. And I think there's so many different ways that people work. And it's actually something that I address in the book is the sort of obsession with the professionalization of art and this idea that you're not a legitimate artist if you don't do it vocationally.
Gabriel Kahane:
And of course, history is littered with instances of that not being the case, whether it's the playwright Anton Chekhov, who was a medical doctor or Charles Ives, who was an insurance salesman, or the photographer, Vivian Maier, who was a nanny.
Gabriel Kahane:
And we can think of many, many other instances of people who either maintained day jobs throughout their lives or toiled, made very little money doing their creative practice. And I think there's also, particularly in the United States, but increasingly as the US exports its sort of ethos of capitalism, there's a political philosopher named Michael J. Sandel, who teaches at Harvard, who wrote a book that was published a few years ago called The Tyranny of Merit. And one of the ideas in that book that I really love is he observes that in the United States over the last 50 years, we increasingly confer dignity on people based on their contribution to GDP, that dignity is associated with how much money you either make or create for the economy. And he sort of connects that to the proliferation of right-wing populism, that there is a question of dignity and that even though the sort of solutions that right-wing populism in the United States proposes are totally fake, and that of course we now see more clearly than ever.
Gabriel Kahane:
And I think that part of the fracture and the MAGA movement in the US is arriving because the corruption and the self-dealing has become so explicit and so out in the open. And you hear people who voted for Trump saying, people who voted for Trump three times saying, "Oh, he's really just serving himself." Nevertheless, I think there was a feeling, particularly in 2016, that the culture at large had begun to be extremely dismissive of people who worked with their hands, who did manual labor, who did factory work, and that in an earlier era in the US, dignity was conferred for any number of reasons. I mean, you could also say the same thing about school teachers in the US. There have been so many instances in the last decade of unions of school teachers in the US going on strike because their work is not valued, and yet they're doing the most important labor.
Gabriel Kahane:
They're teaching our children, right? Teaching them how to be good participants in society. So I think that what happens in the arts is a microcosm of that, and that this idea that your art is only valuable if it makes money, if you're famous, it really is destructive to so many people who I imagine are incredibly brilliant artists, but who've been sort of told that their art is not worthwhile. Now I've completely lost the thread of how I got onto this topic.
Leah Roseman:
We were talking about finding time to create-
Gabriel Kahane:
Oh, yes, yes, yes. Right. We're talking about sort of creative practice.
Gabriel Kahane:
When I met the songwriter, Sufjan Stevens, who I think is one of our great songwriters of this era, he had only recently quit his job as a graphic designer at Time Warner. He made what's arguably one of the greatest albums of the last 25 years, "Come On! Feel the Illinoise". He was working full-time as a graphic designer when he made that record. And he's someone from whom I learned a lot through collaborating with him. I wrote some string arrangements for him and he did a few things for records of mine. He had this very, very kind of blue collar approach to his work having grown up in working class community in Michigan. He was very unprecious about his songwriting. He said, "I'm going to work." He worked six days a week, 12 hour days, and really treated songwriting in this kind of artisanal, not artisanal in the way that it's been co-opted by marketing people, but artisanal in the sense of like being a carpenter.
Gabriel Kahane:
He worked like an artisan and he just worked and worked and worked and eventually had written enough songs where he said, "Oh, there's an album here." And was so incredibly productive. But I also think that sometimes an hour a day can be sufficient to bring extraordinary work into the world. And one of the things that I hope to achieve if and when this book gets published is to encourage people who are school teachers or wine merchants or factory workers to not allow the world to tell them that their creative labor is without value and that the things that we can bring into the world through a little bit every day can be just as valuable as the work of those people who dedicate their whole lives to art making.
Leah Roseman:
Beautiful. Now you have new songs you've been touring with a full band.
Gabriel Kahane:
Yeah. I mean, the next big project that's song based is this album called Elevator Songs that will be announced in mid-February and will come out probably end of March, early April, and we'll be touring with Room Full of Teeth. I don't know. Are you familiar with them?
Leah Roseman:
They've come up. I started following them. It's like, yeah.
Gabriel Kahane:
There's a lot. Yeah. There's a lot to keep tabs on. Yeah. So that's ... I mean, I did these two sort of one-off shows in New York and in Portland for a bunch of new songs that I wrote earlier this year, but that's not really going to be relevant to my touring life for the next season and a half. Yeah. The projects that I'm going to be touring are the one with Pekka, which actually is coming to Ottawa in late July of next year.
Leah Roseman:
Let's talk about that duo
Gabriel Kahane:
Yeah, sure. Absolutely.
Leah Roseman:
Council is the name of it?
Gabriel Kahane:
Yes. Yeah. So Council is a duo with my dear friend and collaborator, Pekka Kuusisto, who is just one of the most amazing musicians. He's from Finland and we were introduced by a mutual friend in St. Paul, Minnesota, I think back in 2016. And he sort of immediately invited me to come to his festival in Finland. And over the course of, I think, three sessions, two in Finland, one in Portland, we wrote about an hour's worth or more of music and we're sort of right now putting the finishing touches on our first album, which is sort of a marriage of all the things we do, Scandinavian folk music, song, chamber music. And yeah, I mean, it's a sort of pinching myself moment every time I think about that music because he's maybe the most natural musician I've ever encountered. There's no friction in terms of his ability to express himself, whether it's playing Beethoven violin concerto or Ligeti Concerto or conducting. He's doing more of that now, but also an incredible improviser and also does extraordinary stuff with pedals, sort of electronic music, and has now also begun to sing. And so it's really just like a total joy to make music with him.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. I've been fortunate to have him on our stage here at the National Arts Centre and yeah, couldn't agree with you more. I'm curious, you've been conducting more lately. We could talk about your clarinet concerto, Anthony McGill, but you never took conducting lessons, right? I'm assuming you learned from your dad and some of your friends and ...
Gabriel Kahane:
I've really just begun to conduct. I mean, I think I can still count on two hands the number of conducting engagements I've done. So the imposter syndrome there is very real. I started conducting actually because of Teddy Abrams, who I know you just worked with. Teddy, when he was the music director of the Britt Festival in Southern Oregon, started this project called the Composer Conductor Fellowship in which he invited conductors or rather invited composers to come learn to conduct sort of under his tutelage. And the animating idea there was his belief that if you conduct, you should compose, and if you compose, you should conduct that the two things will feed each other. And so I went and did the Marquez Danzon number two, which is a great sort of pedagogical piece. It has sort of all the different things or many of the different things that you need to learn how to do as a conductor, and was given a kind of crazy amount of podium time for, I think it's like a nine minute piece, and I got almost two hours to work on it, which is a lot.
Gabriel Kahane:
And I was terrible. No, actually, I wasn't terrible. I was actually told by a lot of people in the orchestra that for a first timer, it was pretty good, which was still very bad, but it did sort of give me the bug. And then I kind of volunteered my services to go conduct my piano concerto with St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, which was another great sort of learning environment because they do so much without a conductor. And there I felt a little bit more confident. And you mentioned the clarinet concerto. I just led that a few months ago in Santa Fe. And that was probably my fifth or sixth time on the podium. And that was the first time where I felt like I wasn't sort of thinking self-consciously about the mechanics. It's a really fun piece to conduct. It has a lot of different challenges, both some mixed meter stuff and also some very lyrical things where it's really about kind of drawing a long line from the ensemble.
Gabriel Kahane:
But one thing that I can say for certain is that it really has transformed the way that I think about writing orchestral music, because once you've been on the podium, you have to think about how someone's going to conduct every bar that you write. And it's so obvious to me when I look at a lot of orchestral scores that composer has not thought at all about how something's going to be conducted or how it's going to be played. And so I think Teddy's intuition is really correct that once you get on the podium, it's going to make you a better composer because you're going to have a different kind of empathy or compassion for the person who has to put it together. And something that I think about much more now is like the risk reward ratio of, do I really need this irrational meter of three, five of three quintuplets for a bar or could I just write it with rubato?
Gabriel Kahane:
But really, I think it's made me sort of more and more efficient in thinking of how is the time going to be used and is it really worth it? Is there a simpler way to convey this? And even between the premiere of the clarinet concerto in January and when I let it in October, I did a revision and some of what I revised had to do with just practical things of meter for certain things where it turned out there was a simpler way to get the same result. And I remember in a very, very early piece that I wrote for the LA Phil, which John Adams had effectively commissioned that an early lesson that lingers with me and that when I have the opportunity to teach something that I pass on is like, the simplest way to put something on the page, if it gets the same result sonically, is always the way to do it.
Gabriel Kahane:
Like don't be pedantic even if you're hearing some really, really complex mixed meter, if you can write the thing in 4/4, of course, there's also the question of what does the orchestra see versus what they hear? And I always try to lead with that what they see reflects what they're hearing, but there are some instances when keeping a sort of simple meter is the best thing to do. And of course, there's no one rule, and I'm sure that as an orchestral musician, you've seen it all and you probably have ideas about this as well. But yeah, I mean, to your question, I have not studied conducting formally, but I do have the advantage of being the son of a very, very fine conductor. And so when I do have questions of, how would you approach this? Would you do it in two? Would you do it in four? Would you do it in one? I'm a phone call away from someone who can answer those questions.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Previously on this podcast, I had the really wonderful composer, Nimrod Borenstein, who conducts and he'd stopped performing. He was mostly a violin soloist, also piano, but he thought, "Well, I won't have to keep in shape the same way if I conduct." But he also said he'd want to spend too much time conducting so he had more time to compose. And I asked him, because my impression after I've been an orchestral musician for almost 35 years, is that it's very hard to conduct because there's so few good conductors, really. But Nimrod said, no, no. If you understand the score, it's no problem. You have to really understand the music. What would you say to that?
Gabriel Kahane:
Well, I think that there are a lot of conductors who sort of have the mechanics, but aren't really maybe great musicians, but I also think that when you see a truly great conductor, like for me, someone like Esa-Pekka, who I think is just, he plays the orchestra like an instrument and every performance that I've ever seen him give, people talk about him being cold, but I don't find that at all. Every time I've seen him, I've found that performance is truly electrifying. I think that there's like very good and then there are the true greats. And I do think that as a composer, the advantage that you have is you understand the architecture of the music in a way that a lot of conductors really have to learn.That's the big lift for them. It's not necessarily the physical mechanics, but it's really understanding the music.
Gabriel Kahane:
And also, a lot of composers, not all, but a lot tend to have very good ears. And so we have sort of a leg up there. I think I have pretty good rehearsal technique. I think I tend to be pretty efficient and know which hills to die on and which hills not to die on in terms of how precise a particular moment, how obsessive to get about this or that. But when it comes to like really being a poet on the podium and really, really having that sort of frictionless relationationship to the band physically and sort of intuiting like, what do we do with the left hand and what do those gestures really mean? What do they convey and what do they elicit from the orchestra?That's where I feel like true artistry on the podium enters and that's where I don't feel like I'm there yet.
Gabriel Kahane:
That being said, in the last couple times that I've been on the podium, there's also something to be said for the energy that you bring. And I think that sometimes as a composer, whether or not you're interpreting your own work, I had the opportunity recently to conduct an evening length piece by my friend and colleague, Carla Kihlstedt, who I admire so much as a singer, violinist and composer.
Gabriel Kahane:
And I think the enthusiasm that a conductor brings for the work can be infectious, whether it's their own work or somebody else's. But I don't ... It's funny, Teddy says sort of similarly self-effacing things about conducting. He says, "Oh, it's not that hard." But of course he's conducted hundreds and hundreds of concerts. And I think I have a real reverence when I watch someone, I've never seen him live, but when I watch videos of someone like Kirill Petrenko at the Berlin Phil, what he's able to do, the economy of motion, I have a real reverence for that. And I think, and the same thing when I watch my dad, he's been conducting now for 30 plus years or maybe more than that, only experience can teach you when you can really just let go and allow, put your right hand down in a Haydn symphony and just let them play versus when that's actually going to be sort of destructive to this energy of a performance.
Gabriel Kahane:
And so I think it's easy to say, "Oh, conducting isn't that hard." But to me, there are a lot of conductors who are very good, and then there are a few who are truly extraordinary. And getting to that final echelon is something that I think does not happen without a huge amount of work. I mean, I haven't seen him work, but I've heard people like Klaus Mäkelä that he's just like a total natural and that he just kind of got on the podium and immediately was able to do extraordinary things with the orchestra. Of course, also in Finland, they have this amazing pedagogical sort of pipeline of conductor pedagogy. So I don't know, I still have a lot of reverence for conductors at the same time that I've also seen from sitting in a hall, watching a peace of mind be rehearsed, have the frustration of like, "Oh, there's some really basic music making things that are not happening." I've certainly had the experience of working with conductors where I wish that some of the basic music making were at a higher level.
Leah Roseman:
I was curious about some of your early history, because you are an actor, you were in the theater, and I had read that you felt like there's that post-performance blues, which musicians feel as well, especially with the big buildup, but you felt that your genesis to writing songs came from having something more permanent. Is that true?
Gabriel Kahane:
Oh, that sounds familiar. I feel like I probably would've said that a very long time ago.
Leah Roseman:
OK.
Gabriel Kahane:
That sounds like something I said. I don't think it's false. I mean, I have a vague memory of having said something like that, but yeah, I mean, it's kind of a classic trip with actors that actors don't have a sense of ownership or permanence. There's something ephemeral about being an actor. And I did a lot of acting as a child and then as a teenager and in college, and it was in college when I started sort of writing music a little bit more formally, first in the context of theater, and then later for myself as a songwriter. I think there are certain things about my experience as an actor. I had a very unusual high school theater experience where I was in a public school, but there was kind of magnet arts program. And my teacher, John Craven, had us doing plays by Chekhov and Oscar Wilde and Carol Churchill and Tony Kushner, which is really, really unusual for public high school and had this really, really rigorous approach to teaching acting.
Gabriel Kahane:
And I think that some of that followed me when I started writing songs where the great theater composer, Adam Guettel, talks about applying the idea of method acting to songwriting, where you can really try to completely throw yourself into the experience of the character from whose perspective you're writing. And I think that to a certain extent, I imagine that my experience of working on plays and approaching a role, which I haven't done for more than 20 years now, nevertheless informed the way that I think about songwriting, particularly when it comes to character or even just like doing a free write, there's this sort of like murky space between fiction writing, acting and songwriting, where it's like, how do you just completely throw yourself into the experience of someone else? And that also, I think, connects back to my mother, the psychologist, and what is required to be a great therapist or to be a great partner.
Gabriel Kahane:
I dated someone many years ago whose mother was also a therapist and she had said to her mother, "How do I know when I'm dating the right person?" And her mom said, "Someone who not only asks great questions, but asks great follow-up questions is the person you should be married to. " And I think that when you're a songwriter, you can sort of apply that same logic where it's not just what would this character be feeling on a particular day, but like what do they do when they're feeling bad? How do they soothe themself? How do they self-medicate? Where do they go? What music do they listen to? What do they eat? What do they wear? Just really sort of thinking about every possible variable in world building. And so I think that there is, when you do, whether you call it method acting or something else, but you're sort of building a world around a character, I think the same thing is very much the case in songwriting.
Gabriel Kahane:
So very often for me, songs begin with a free write in which I'm trying to build a world around a character. And once you've built that world around the character, then you can start to try to distill into rhyming couplets.
Leah Roseman:
You do a lot of traveling. Do you find when you're in airports or restaurants that you can't help but listen in on people's conversations?
Gabriel Kahane:
Yeah, for sure. I mean, I will also say that I increasingly, I feel so distracted. I mean, I think I read somewhere, I can't remember who it was, but someone said that like 2017 was the moment when push notifications were born on our smartphones, and that the sort of real era of total fragmentation and distraction really begins in 2017 with push notifications. And I don't have notifications on my phone and I still, I don't have a SIM card in my phone. When I did my year of no internet, I got this thing called a light phone, which is just kind of like basically a sophisticated dumb phone. And I used that during my year offline. It just made phone calls and I continued to use it for years afterward until I was sort of a little bit pushed by my management to go back on social media for understandable reasons.
Gabriel Kahane:
I think I had had this fantasy that I could rely on traditional press, traditional media to get the word out about my work, but it just doesn't exist anymore. And so there's a certain amount of self-promotion, unfortunately, that is required. When I travel now, I feel so fragmented because I never quite feel like I'm just in one place. There's a part of me that's in the airport and there's another part of me that is dealing with email about this project or that project. And so the ways in which I used to people watch are just not the same, I don't do it with the same focus that I once did and I miss that. And it's something that I would like to return to because I think there's a song to be found in every experience and in every observation, but you have to give over to a kind of concentration to really make that happen.
Gabriel Kahane:
And when I look through the Notes app on my iPhone, it's like three lines about this, three lines about that. And I remember in my early 20s when I lived in New York, I did so much writing on the subway. I would watch people and I would invent stories about the people I was watching. There are many, many universes to be extracted from what you see on the train and I don't feel as connected to that kind of observational writing as I once, once did. But I also think the Book of Travelers experience of writing songs about people I met on the train, that kind of ethnography is something that I've carried forward in pieces like emergency shelter intake form. Oh
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, let's talk about that.
Gabriel Kahane:
Emergency shelter intake form is a big oratorial that I wrote about the housing crisis in Portland, and it's sort of indirectly how I ended up living here. I was commissioned back in 2016. I remember sort of oddly, I was standing in what was then called the Time Warner Center in Midtown Manhattan, which is this kind of like monument to capitalism. And I got this call out of the blue from the Oregon Symphony saying, "Would you like to write a piece about homelessness?" There's sort of perfect irony in standing amidst these high end retail stores being asked to write about a housing crisis. So I ended up agreeing to do that piece despite having some misgivings about, well, why is a symphony orchestra taking this on and why am I the right person to do it? I live in New York, I don't live in Portland, but I also, it was a huge opportunity to write a big work for an orchestra, which at the time was still sort of riding on the high of Alex Ross had written this beautiful column about the work that they had done in the Springfield Music Festival a few years earlier.
Gabriel Kahane:
And I'd heard them play just amazing orchestra that really kind of punches above its weight in terms of reputation and budget. (clip XI. A Brief History of The Subprime Mortgage Loan Crisis, "emegency shelter intake form")
Gabriel Kahane:
Anyway, so I ended up kind of finding my way into that piece and into feeling like it was my story to tell when I came to see homelessness, really just as an extreme symptom of inequality and the extent to which we're all sort of implicated in inequality in whatever society we live in. And I started volunteering at a homeless shelter in Midtown Manhattan. I was still, of course, living in New York at the time. And that process was really quite radicalizing for me. I think before writing that piece, I had been a liberal and writing a big piece about the housing crisis in America made me a leftist. It pushed my politics much further to the left. It didn't happen all at once. There's an incredible book by Matthew Desmond called Evicted, which is about the sort of eviction crisis in America. And that was quite radicalizing for me.
Gabriel Kahane:
And then also the experience of volunteering and meeting all these guys who were employed, some of whom had full-time jobs and yet couldn't afford housing in New York. And I think this is less the case now, but I think even through the 2010s in this country, it was very easy to think that people fell into homelessness because they had done something wrong. And I think that the veil has very much fallen from people's eyes now. I think we now, there's a sort of collective understanding of how completely sick the American economy is and that it's not ... We don't actually have free market capitalism. We have a kind of redistributive capitalism that redistributes wealth upward. And that both through tax code and through the way that our financial system has been deregulated, we have laws that make the very rich, richer, and make everyone else suffer.
Gabriel Kahane:
And the general sort of baseline economic precarity that is the norm for working people is just so profoundly unacceptable. And the reason that right-wing populism has succeeded in this country is in large part that the Democratic Party came to be seen as both the party of the establishment and also as a party that didn't really have answers to that profound inequality and precarity. So "emergency shelter intake form", which I wrote after I had taken my train trip, but before Book of Travelers came out, there's a way in which those two pieces are, even though one is a big orchestral work and the other is this very intimate piano and voice album, they're related in the sense that they're both rooted in this kind of first person ethnographic research of talking to people about their lives and trying to put myself into the experience of someone's shoes that are very different than my own.
Gabriel Kahane:
And I think they also speak to an increasingly blurred line between my work as an artist and my work, I guess, as a kind of artist citizen. (clip III. Where Did You Stay Last Night from "emergency shelter intake form")
Leah Roseman:
Well, before we close this out, I did want to circle back to one of your earliest things, your Craigslistlieder, because that kind of propelled you in terms of your ... It's referred to as a cult status as a singer/songwriter, actually. The people really ... It resonated with this. And what strikes me about that project is even the more humorous songs, you have such a deep empathy, I feel, for the people and the stories.
Gabriel Kahane:
Yeah. I mean, that piece is almost 20 years old now, which is kind of wild to contemplate. I wrote it in 2006. I think I was 24 when I started writing that piece. And I was, and I think this probably does come back to sort of my training in theater and the sort of philosophy of comedy in the theater, which is that you can't look for laughs. You can't approach comedy with the hope of it being funny. You have to approach comedy as an expression of truth and that the things that are really, really funny and that remain funny are funny because they reveal something about human psychology. And so when I was starting to write that piece, I wrote it because I used Craigslist a lot as a young 20 something in New York to buy futons and bicycles and whatever. And it was this sort of tender moment in the early internet where the way that we understood public and private space was shifting and the way that anonymity on the internet gave people an outlet to say really, really vulnerarable things, but behind this veil of nobody knows who you are.
Gabriel Kahane:
And so what I was really looking for, for the most part, were posts that felt like they had a kind of vulnerability to them that even if someone is being really funny online, it is also a cry to be seen, right? To be seen and heard. And I think that that piece has had a long life. It's performed by a lot of other singers because there is some kind of ache or emotional truth there that people are looking for connection and looking to be seen. It's a piece that I mostly don't perform myself anymore, and I'm happy to sort of pass on to other people to do these days.
Leah Roseman:
Well, thanks so much for this today. Really appreciate it.
Gabriel Kahane:
Of course. It's my pleasure.
Leah Roseman:
I hope you enjoyed this episode. Keep in mind, I've also linked directly several episodes you'll find interesting in the show notes of this one. Please do share this with your friends and check out episodes you may have missed at leahroseman.com. If you could buy me a coffee to support this series, that would be wonderful. I'm an independent podcaster and I really do need the help of my listeners. All the links are in the show notes. The podcast theme music was written by Nick Kold. Have a wonderful week.
