Gabriel Kahane + Roomful of Teeth
Elevator Songs
Octoverse Media + Warner Music Group’s Arts Music
OUT APRIL 3
CONTACT:
LYDIA KRUMPER // PUBLICIST
AVA KELLY // PUBLICIST
Nine characters. Six rooms. One interdimensional hotel. With Elevator Songs, the first collaboration between multi-Grammy-winning vocal group Roomful of Teeth and singer-songwriter/composer Gabriel Kahane, the laws of time and space give way to pure feeling. Here is an album in which fizzy hooks, slippery chord changes, and the sublime counterpoint of eight voices combine to create a singular, panoramic vision.
With each song—one for each member of Roomful of Teeth and bookended by a pair of tunes sung by Kahane, who wrote and arranged the entire work—a distinct world emerges in a succession of hotel rooms: here, a newlywed undone by the sublime topography of the American Southwest; there, a man in midtown Manhattan writing a eulogy for a young AIDS victim in the late 1980s; here again, a fashion influencer slash spiritual guru recording a podcast episode in a militarized, near-future Texas; thereagain, a U.S. service member confronting PTSD after tours of Iraq and Afghanistan in the mid-aught. Taken as a whole, the LP is as emotionally enveloping as it is sonically diverse.
Scored for the eight voices of Roomful of Teeth plus Kahane on keyboards and guitar,the album draws additional color from two members of the vocal ensemble—Eliza Baggon violin alongside Jodie Landau on vibraphone. Holed up at Flora Recording and Playback in Portland, Oregon, where Kahane lives, the group tracked the album in a whirlwind four days at the end of 2024 with the help of three-time Grammy-nominated engineer/producer Joseph Lorge (Feist, Japanese Breakfast, hand habits, Blake Mills/PinoPalladino), whose deft touch can be heard throughout.
Elevator Songs grew out of a longstanding circuit of mutual admiration. Kahane andTeeth had been moving in concentric creative circles for more than a decade before the ensemble’s founder, Brad Wells, and current artistic director, Cameron Beauchamp,approached Gabriel about writing a “Roomful of Teeth Songbook.” Where the group had come to prominence for its electrifying ensemble work, winning its first Grammy in 2014 for its self-titled debut (featuring Caroline Shaw’s Pulitzer Prize-winningPartita for 8Voices), this new project would feature each of the singers individually. Kahane,meanwhile, has been lauded for his ability to richly embody a wide array of characters in works likeBook of Travelers(“a stunning portrait of a singular moment in America,”Rolling Stone), released in 2018; and emergency shelter intake form, an orchestral oratorio confronting economic inequality through the lens of homelessness, which has been performed in a number of major cities on both sides of the Atlantic.
The resulting album runs the emotional gamut from the ridiculous (“Valise,” “Hot Tub”) to the wrenching (“Not Even the Dead,” “Memory Burns”) and everything in between. It sounds like nothing so much as itself, and yet, for all of its freshness, it is, first foremost, a rich and resonant collage documenting the human condition.
PRESS RELEASES