For composer-singer-songwriter Gabriel Kahane, there's a story behind every song. Often, it's a really big story.

Gabriel’s Guide to the 48 States (2013) surveyed America through the lens of Works Progress Administration guides. The Ambassador (2014) focused on 10 locations in Los Angeles that offer insights into the American zeitgeist. For 2018's Book of Travelers, he spent 13 days traveling cross-country by train shortly after the November 2016 election (8980 miles). Looking to understand the roots of America's divided culture, he left his cell phone and at home in Brooklyn and sat down face-to-face with dozens of fellow passengers in Amtrak dining cars.

That trip was the genesis of a more intimate project, Magnificent Bird, a song cycle that mostly leaves the big stories behind to focus on the everyday. Kahane will perform Magnificent Bird with Milwaukee's Present Music at the Jan Serr Studio on May 31st and June 1st.

His cell-phone-less train trip got Kahane thinking about the "digital regime" and its place in the culture. As told me by phone from his home in Portland, Oregon, Book of Travelers is about "leaving technology to connect more with other people. I wanted to explore all of the human interactions that have been vacuumed out of our lives because of the internet. After that trip, I remember thinking, 'I could do this for longer than two weeks.'"

So, in November, 2019, he began a yearlong "internet hiatus." But face-to-face human interactions became nearly impossible four months later, when the COVID pandemic hit. "I had imagined that project as a more public-facing inquiry, but with quarantine, that year became much more of a monastic, inward-looking journey. It was not what I signed up for."

Other projects and distractions kept him from focusing on writing: curating a digital performance series for the Portland Symphony, dealing with the anxiety of wildfires that engulfed the northwest in September. But in October, 2020, he made a commitment: write one song every day. That commitment would eventually lead to Magnificent Bird.

"I didn't really know I was writing an album," he explains. It was more like an exercise, and it led to a very different kind of songwriting."

Kahane would start each day by "free-writing" for 30 or 45 minutes. "Then, I would type it up and find some sort of musical logic to it," he explains. "Sometimes that took two drafts. Sometimes it took eight drafts. I was always done by 4 pm so I could cook dinner with my family."

That sort of discipline wasn't second nature for him. "I've always envied my friends who have really pretty ordained ways of writing," he says. "Until then, I did it every which way. Sometimes, I wrote songs as a study where there's a technical problem I'm trying to solve. Other times there were characters or events I wanted to write about. I might start with a free-write but with a story in mind."

There are stories in Magnificent Bird. "Sit Shiva," the powerful recounting of his grandmother's Zoom funeral service, and the title track. But the others belong more in the realm of poetry.

"My friend Matthew Zapruder says that poetry is the act of aesthetizing the movement of a thought through the brain," Kahane explains. "And I think a lot of these songs have that ethos because they were created in a stream of consciousness. This is just a snapshot of where I was at this moment. They are extremely modest gestures."

To be sure. But the "modest gestures" of Magnificent Bird don't totally leave behind the wide, dark world. In one song, the beauty of a hazelnut tree offers respite from "fresh threats of doom" in the newspaper. In another, the ritual of a morning cup of coffee is enjoyed while reading about the prospect of another civil war.

He promises, however, that his Present Music concert won't be all doom and gloom. He's added several songs that aren't on the recording, and scripted the show so it resembles a kind of theater piece. "I've written a lot of sad or dark songs in my life," he says, "so I've tried to keep my banter as a kind of counterpoint to that."

“It's somewhere between a memoir, a comedy show, a lecture and a concert."

Gabriel Kahane performs Magnificent Bird in Present Music's final concert of the season at the Jan Serr Studio, 2155 N Prospect Ave. Violinist/Singer/Composer Carla Kihlstedt will perform an opening solo set of her original music. For tickets and information to go presentmusic.org/events.