Gabriel Kahane

The chaos of the 21st century

»Magnificent Bird« is the fifth studio album by singer-songwriter Gabriel Kahane. The album is the result of a self-imposed isolation: it was created over the course of a year spent entirely without internet – with the support of great artists such as Andrew Bird, Chris Thile, Sylvan Esso’s Amelia Meath, and the Pulitzer Award-winner and composer Caroline Shaw. In October 2020 – the last month of his digital hiatus and of a very wild and chaotic time in the United States – Kahane wrote a song every day. »I wanted to create an aural brain scan at the end of this experiment and to give myself permission to write about small things, rather than trying to distil the enormity of the moment into grand statements.« The resulting album shows Gabriel Kahane as a songwriter who moves back and forth between the prosaic events of everyday life and a series of overlapping national and global crises: a portrait of life in the raging chaos of the 21st century.