In anticipation of the Playwrights Horizons production of Gabriel Kahane’s Magnificent Bird / Book of Travelers, Nonesuch Records releases a new recording of “Red Letter Days” today; you can hear it below and here. Kahane wrote the song in October 2020, during the final month of a year spent off the internet, at the height of the pandemic. The previously unreleased track, along with others from his October 2020 song-a-day project, will be performed by Kahane as part of the beloved New York City theater’s staged presentation of music from the Nonesuch albums Magnificent Bird and Book of Travelers September 24–October 6, 2024; tickets available here.

In this duo of intimate solo musical plays, Kahane blends songwriting and storytelling for a singular, poignant theatrical event. Book of Travelers recounts the strangers he met on a 9,000-mile train journey through a divided America, and Magnificent Bird chronicles a year he spent entirely off-line, and the unexpected turbulence of living quietly. Performed on alternating nights, these two concept albums offer a relentless self-inquiry, and a searing portrait of a world in flux.

On Magnificent Bird, Kahane revels in the tension between his own experiences of grief, nostalgia, shame, and salvation, and the roiling chaos of a nation and planet in crisis. In October 2020, the final month of the year he spent off the internet, Kahane set out to write a song every day; “Red Letter Days” was one of those songs. “I wanted to create 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.”

“My internet hiatus grew out of a belief that at root, our digital devices reinforce the fiction that convenience and efficiency have intrinsic value. That has implications with respect to climate crisis, to inequality, to our (in)ability to see ourselves in each other, to build the kinds of coalitions necessary to make a more just world. I wanted to leave it all behind not as a further expression of techno-pessimism, but rather in search of a positive alternative.

“In that sense, this record relates to Book of Travelers,” he muses, referring to his 2018 Nonesuch debut. That album chronicled a 9,000-mile, off-the-grid railway journey in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election. “I wanted unmediated interaction with strangers, so I took that trip without my phone. Somewhere in New Mexico, I remember thinking, ‘Wow, this is really transformative. I should do this for more than thirteen days.’”

Hailed as “one of the finest songwriters of the day” by the New Yorker, Gabriel Kahane is a musician and storyteller whose work spans the theater, club, and concert hall. During the 2024-25 season, he tours as a duo with fellow composer/performer and label mate Caroline Shaw in the United States and Europe. This season also witnesses the premiere of two major concert works: an orchestral oratorio, co-commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony and Oregon Symphony, chronicling the aftermath of the 2020 Almeda Wildfire; and a clarinet concerto for Anthony McGill, which premieres with the Orlando Philharmonic. Other performance highlights include a solo debut with the Orchestre National de Lyon, as well as Kahane’s San Francisco conducting debut in Carla Kihlstedt’s Twenty-six Little Deaths.

Gabriel Kahane’s discography includes five LPs as a singer-songwriter; The Fiction Issue, an album of chamber music with string quartet Brooklyn Rider; as well as emergency shelter intake form, which was heard last season in San Francisco and London, having been commissioned and recorded by the Oregon Symphony, for whom Kahane is now in his second term as Creative Chair. Upcoming recordings include Heirloom, a piano concerto written for his father, the noted pianist and conductor Jeffrey Kahane; as well as the debut album from Council, an ongoing project with violinist, composer, and conductor Pekka Kuusisto.

Kahane lives with his family in Portland, where he serves as Creative Chair for the Oregon Symphony.