In 2016 Gabriel Kahane delivered The Ambassador, an aching portrait of Los Angeles seen through the lens of ten street addresses, one for each song. The fuel for the album was varied and incredulous – Bruce Willis’ hair, detective fiction, modernist architecture, and race riots. So the news of a new album had me feeling pleasantly inquisitive.
The narratives for his new album Book of Travelers is also rooted in geography although these are tales told to him upon a long train journey – like some sort of musical version of Robert Frank, the photographer who travelled around 48 states in an old car photographing scenes that became The Americans…as Jack Kerouac said “he sucked a sad poem out of America onto film, taking rank among the tragic poets of the world”.
The morning after the 2016 presidential election, I packed a suitcase and boarded Amtrak’s Lake Shore Limited bound for Chicago. Over the next thirteen days, I talked to dozens of strangers whom I met, primarily, in dining cars aboard the six trains that would carry me some 8,980 miles around the country. The songs on this album are intended as a kind of loose diary of that journey, and as a portrait of America at a time of profound national turbulence.
The video for November is by Robert Edridge-Waks with original footage by Jim Findlay.
Book of Travelers, out August 24 on Nonesuch Records.
http://smarturl.it/bookoftravelers