Elevator Songs Roomful of Teeth & Gabriel Kahane

• 1 Speaking In Tongues (Prologue) 03:28
• 2 Going Up - Third Floor 00:07
• 3 Newborn Plague (Room 304) 03:03
• 4 Going Up - Eighth Floor 00:09
• 5 St. Vincent's Hospital (Room 813) 02:57
• 6 Going Up - Eighteenth Floor 00:15
• 7 Put It In My Valise (Room 1832) 05:00
• 8 Down the Hallway... 00:58
• 9 Rack of Time (Room 1801) 03:44
• 10 The Machine Room (Entr'acte) 01:15
• 11 Going Down - Twelfth Floor 00:09
• 12 Sophomore Record (Room 1211) 02:30
• 13 Going Down - Second Floor 00:16
• 14 The Hot Tub (Fitness Center) 04:44
• 15 Going Up - Twelfth Floor 00:14
• 16 Not Even the Dead (Room 1212) 02:20
• 17 Going Down - The Lobby 00:21
• 18 Memory Burns (The Bar) 03:51
• 19 Going Up... 00:19
• 20 All That Is Solid (The Elevator) 04:28
• Total Runtime 40:08

Info for Elevator Songs

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 series 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; there again, a U.S. service member confronting PTSD after tours of Iraq and Afghanistan in the mid-aught. Taken as a whole, the album 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 Bagg on 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/Pino Palladino), whose deft touch can be heard throughout.

Elevator Songs grew out of a longstanding circuit of mutual admiration. Kahane and Teeth 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-winning Partita for 8 Voices), 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 like Book 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 and foremost, a rich and resonant collage of the timeless travails of the human condition.

Roomful of Teeth:
Estelí Gomez, vocals
Mingjia Chen, vocals
Eliza Bagg, vocals
Martha Cluver, vocals
Virginia Kelsey, vocals
Steven Bradshaw, vocals
Jodie Landau, vocals
Thann Scoggin, vocals
Cameron Beauchamp, vocals
Gabriel Kahane, piano, synths, Ace Tone organ, electric and acoustic guitars
Eliza Bagg, violin
Jodie Landau, vibraphone (except solo on “Rack ofTime,” performed by Gabriel Kahane

Recorded at Flora Recording & Playback in Portland, Oregon, by Joseph Lorge
Additional recording at the homes of Gabriel (Portland), Joseph (Pasadena), and Chris Morrissey (Brooklyn)
Mixed by Joseph Lorge in Pasadena, CA
Produced by Gabriel Kahane and Joseph Lorge

Gabriel Kahane
is a musician, writer, and storyteller. Highlights of the 25/26 season include collaborations with Roomful of Teeth, Attacca Quartet, and Jeffrey Kahane; conducting debuts with Santa Fe Pro Music and the San Antonio Philharmonic; composer-in-residence posts with the University of Iowa and the Charlotte Symphony; the world premiere of a new set of songs at the 92nd Street Y; and the Carnegie Hall premiere of If love will not swing wide the gates, a \ clarinet concerto written for Anthony McGill.

An avid theater artist, Kahane opened last season at Playwrights Horizons with the off-Broadway debut of two solo pieces, Magnificent Bird and Book of Travelers, the latter of which chronicled the composer’s 8,980-mile railway journey in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election. His album & stage spectacle, The Ambassador, was produced at the BAM Next Wave Festival in 2014, under the direction of Tony-winner John Tiffany. A musical, February House, written with the playwright Seth Bockley, received its New York premiere at the Public Theater in 2012. In 2018, Kahane made his Broadway debut with the score for Kenneth Lonergan’s play The Waverly Gallery, starring Elaine May, Lucas Hedges, and Michael Cera.

Kahane is known for tackling politically thorny subject matter in his work with subtlety and grace, perhaps most notably in his orchestral oratorio, emergency shelter intake form, which addresses economic inequality through the lens of homelessness and housing insecurity, and has been heard from London to New York to Chicago to San Francisco and beyond. He is also increasingly productive as a writer, with prose appearing in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. Via the newsletter “Words and Music,” Kahane publishes bi-weekly essays on a variety of topics, all of which can be accessed at gabrielkahane.substack.com.

Gabriel’s wide-ranging discography includes five albums as a singer-songwriter, several orchestral projects, a disc of chamber music (with the string quartet Brooklyn Rider), as well as various other collaborative albums. He has worked with an array of artists spanning the aesthetic gamut, from Phoebe Bridgers, Paul Simon, Sylvan Esso, Chris Thile, and Sufjan Stevens, to the Danish String Quartet, Caroline Shaw, and Pekka Kuusisto, with whom he plays as the duo Council. The recipient of a 2021 Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Kahane relocated to Portland, OR in the spring of 2020, where he lives with his family and serves as Creative Chair of the Oregon Symphony, a post he has held since 2019.

Roomful of Teeth
is a Grammy Award-winning vocal band dedicated to reimagining the expressive potential of the human voice. By engaging collaboratively with artists, thinkers, and community leaders from around the world, the group seeks to uplift and amplify voices old and new while creating and performing meaningful and adventurous music using a continuously expanding vocabulary of singing techniques.

Roomful of Teeth has built a significant and ever-growing catalog of music through deep collaboration with a broad range of composers including Julia Wolfe, David Lang, Missy Mazzoli, William Brittelle, Angélica Negrón, inti figgis-vizueta, Paola Prestini, Nathalie Joachim, Caroline Shaw, Leilehua Lanzilotti, Anna Clyne, Sarah Kirkland Snider, Gabriela Ortiz, Judd Greenstein, Terry Riley, Toby Twining, Ted Hearne, Eve Beglarian, Caleb Burhans, Michael Harrison, Peter S. Shin, and Jerod Impichchaachaaha' Tate.

Recent appearances include performances at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Paris Philharmonie, Walt Disney Concert Hall, King’s Place in London, and the Barbican. The group has also performed commissioned works for Roomful of Teeth and orchestra with the New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Seattle Symphony, The Cabrillo Festival Orchestra, Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Symphony, and have also moved into stage work with the visionary opera director Peter Sellars in Claude Vivier’s opera Kopernikus.

Roomful of Teeth discography includes their eponymous first album, released in 2012, which was awarded a Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance, and featured Roomful of Teeth member Caroline Shaw's Pulitzer Prize winning piece Partita for 8 Voices. Other recordings include: Render (2015), The Colorado (2016), Yo-Yo Ma’s Silkroad Ensemble’s album Sing Me Home which won the 2016 Grammy for Best World Music Album, and 2 EPs: The Ascendant (Wally Gunn) and Just Constellations (Michael Harrison). Teeth's recordings have been featured on television and in film, including Josephine Decker’s Madeline’s Madeline, Netflix’s Dark, Jeen-Yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy, and Homecoming: A Film by Beyoncé. Their latest album, Rough Magic (New Amsterdam Records, 2023) was captured using groundbreaking recording techniques and innovative spatial technology. Roomful of Teeth was recognized at the 66th GRAMMY awards in 2024, winning Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance for Rough Magic; and composer William Brittelle’s work Psychedelics, which appears on Rough Magic, was nominated for Best Contemporary Classical Composition.

This album contains no booklet.