Elevator Songs

LPA

1. Prologue: Speaking in Tongues
2. Room 304: Newborn Plague
3. Room 813: St Vincent's Hospital
4. Room 1832: Valise
5. Room 1801: Rack of Time

LPB

1. Entr'acte: The Machine Room
2. Room 1211: Sophomore Record
3. Fitness Center: The Hot Tub
4. Room 1212: Not Even the Dead
5. Lobby: Memory Burns
6. The Elevator: All That Is Solid

Today, multi-Grammy-winning vocal group Roomful of Teeth and singer-songwriter/composer Gabriel Kahane shared second single + video, “Not Even The Dead,” off their collaborative album Elevator Songs out April 3 via Octoverse Media and Warner Music Group’s Arts Music. Sung by Mingjia Chen, the track is an emotionally charged meditation on grief, moral injury, and the omnipresence of military-related PTSD. The piece pairs Roomful of Teeth’s hypnotic vocal textures with Kahane’s razor-sharp lyricism, creating a track that feels both fragile and menacing.

“Not even the dead will be safe at this banquet / where nobody knows what to celebrate but anger,” sings Chen in an aching refrain that encapsulates the national mood. It’s a sentiment Kahane arrived at while meditating on the impact of the “Forever Wars” on members of his generation who were called upon to serve—but the song’s muted rage speaks to a broader American malaise. Kahane elaborates on the song’s origins: “Somehow I got to thinking about people my age who served multiple tours of duty in Iraq or Afghanistan, and the trauma that went along with it. There's so much understandable fury throughout society having to do with these wars, which opened up into the broader sense that ours is a culture subsumed in anger.”

The accompanying video, crafted by longtime Kahane collaborator Robert Edridge-Waks, deepens the song’s emotional impact. The animation unfolds as surrealist allegory: here are toy soldiers, wolves, arcade games, dog tags—a claustrophobic world of violence and the psychic wounds left in its wake.

“Writing for Mingjia — who is herself an extraordinary songwriter and composer — captures what’s so special about working with Roomful of Teeth,” says Kahane. “Each member of the group has a rich artistic identity that extends beyond being a great singer. With these songs, I’ve tried to tailor the material to each personality, while also challenging the group — individually and collectively — to step beyond their comfort zones.”

Roomful of Teeth and Kahane will be heading on a US tour next month, hitting New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and more.

The physical album is available for pre-sale on vinyl and CD, both containing the complete lyrics and sleeve notes with design by John Gall. In addition, a limited edition blue colorway version of the vinyl is available and comes with a frame-able 12 x 12 two-sided art print. The first 500 fans to pre-order any version of Elevator Songs from the band's online store will receive a card signed by Kahane and Roomful of Teeth's artistic director, Cameron Beauchamp. 

Co-produced by Kahane alongside Grammy-winning engineer Joseph Lorge (Feist, hand habits, Blake Mills/Pino Palladino), Elevator Songs is as emotionally enveloping as it is sonically diverse. Full of fizzy hooks, slippery chord changes, and bold production moves orbiting eight singers, the album reveals a singular, panoramic vision. With 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 collection of characters emerges, brought together by an interdimensional hotel where laws of time and space give way to pure feeling: 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 in a militarized, near-future Texas; there again, a U.S. service member confronting PTSD after tours of Iraq and Afghanistan in the mid-aughts.

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 producer Joseph Lorge, 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 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.