Book of Travelers

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.

After the 2016 election, the Brooklyn musician embarked on a cross-country train trip that yielded an album that inextricably links America’s abstract political reality with the human lives it has shaped.

Gabriel Kahane set off on a cross-country train journey on November 9, 2016, the day after Donald Trump won the Electoral College vote for President of the...