We interviewed the incredibly inventive musical artist Gabriel Kahane just prior to the release of his 2016 album "The Fiction Issue." He has continued to fashion imaginative works, including 2018's "Book of Travelers," songs inspired by traveling nearly 9,000 miles via trains, all across the country, listening to the stories of fellow passengers. His concept for that collection came together in the wake of the 2016 Presidential election. Kahane is currently the Creative Chair of the Oregon Symphony in Portland.

Gabriel Kahane, singer, composer and multi-instrumentalist, straddles the worlds of pop/folk, classical and theater. He draws from his background to fuel his creativity.

His father Jeffrey Kahane, a concert pianist, was music director of the Santa Rosa, California Symphony. His mother is a psychologist. Kahane says, though the maternal influence might be less obvious, both parents made an impact on his path.

"As I've gotten older and begun to reflect on what it is that I do, looking back on a decade of being a songwriter and a composer, it feels clear that my interest in storytelling and my empathy for the characters in my songs is a direct outgrowth of having an incredibly sympathetic mother who's a psychologist."

Two of Kahane's orchestral song cycles have been conducted by his father for the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. Kahane says, "He is one of my favorite musicians, ego-free. He sets a high bar, as far as just interpreting what's on the page and not trying to assert himself on top of it. He has a real purity to his musicianship, in that sense.

"He and my mother sang together in folk-rock bands, when they were in their teens. He has often said that there is a particular joy for him, having gone in the more core classical direction, in experiencing what I've done, which has been to form a little bit of a union between the two worlds."

The worlds of folk/pop and classical merge as Kahane teams with the string quartet Brooklyn Rider. He was commissioned to write a piece for Carnegie Hall for his 2012 recital debut. It was suggested that he collaborate with musicians he admired. The quartet was among them. So Kahane wrote "The Fiction Issue." They recently recorded the album.

"Collaborating on the project led to a great friendship with all four of the members of Brooklyn Rider, who all live about a mile away from me in various directions [in Brooklyn]. It really all began with that recital," Kahane says.

They share a creative chemistry. "We're all people who don't distinguish between folk music and formal concert music. We adhere to the Duke Ellington adage — 'There are two kinds of music, good music and the other kind.' We all get along well and it's certainly going to be fun to be traveling with them."

The Kahane/Brooklyn Rider tour played Stanford's Bing Concert Hall recently. The string quartet joined Kahane on several compositions, including songs from his recent singer-songwriter effort, "The Ambassador." Ken Capobianco, reviewing the album in the Boston Globe, said, "Theatrical and structurally complex, Kahane's allusive vignettes traverse the worlds of folk-pop, noir-y jazz, and classical music."

The Stanford program included pieces from "The Fiction Issue," and selections from the quartet's "The Brooklyn Rider Almanac" album, as well as Schubert's "Rosamunde Quartet."

"The Ambassador" (which has been adapted as a theatrical production) takes a musical tour of Los Angeles, using memorable landscapes and buildings as reference points. The title track recalls the hotel where Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated. Kahane was born in Venice Beach, California, but was raised primarily in upstate New York.

"I spent my high school years in Santa Rosa, so I kind of inherited the allegiance to Northern California and, therefore, the antipathy for L.A. But as I started going back there in my mid-20s, I found that there was this other dimension of the city that some people even in Los Angeles don't really acknowledge, that there is this incredible ache in the city, not to mention this incredible architectural tradition."

On a morning drive to LAX, using surface roads, Kahane was moved by glimpses into the city's character. This coincided with a new Sony record deal and a commission from Brooklyn Academy of Music to create a stage piece. Thus was 2014's "The Ambassador" born.

"The Fiction Issue," Kahane's first chamber music recording, takes him in new directions. In addition to Brooklyn Rider, vocalist Shara Worden of My Brightest Diamond is featured on the album.

"I was coming up on 10 years of living in New York," Kahane says. "I wanted to write a piece that explored my coming of age and the city's coming of age. I was interested in the issues of maturation. I was also thinking about what it means to move from writing three-minute songs to writing longer forms.

"Pop songs, architecturally, are similar to short stories, in that there's a kind of narrative economy. With "The Fiction Issue," I wanted to see if I could get toward something that was a little more novelistic."

Kahane began writing songs in his teens, when he found his parents' guitars in the attic. But he didn't start writing in earnest until after college. During his college years, he was focused on acting. While at Brown University, he wrote a theatrical musical.

"That got me singing again. I was intoxicated by having something written down. Actors experience postpartum depression when they finish a production, because it's ephemeral. They have nothing to hold onto. When I wrote this theater piece, I was struck by the fact that there was a paper trail, a kind of permanence. Even though it was terrible, I had written something down. That was a feeling that I relished. I can draw a line from that experience to what I've ended up doing."

Kahane went on to write the score for the intimate musical "February House." His influences tend to be literary greats - poet Anne Carson and the German novelist W.G. Sebald - rather than other composers.

"I think of what I do as a way of telling stories, first and foremost. Music is the medium through which I tell stories."

Kahane is excited by the possibilities of cross-pollination among the worlds of pop, classical and theater.

"The only way that art forms move forward is through hybridity. I'm interested in how we can break down the barriers between various forms of expression. We live in a time when critical thinking is at a low point. Very often, there is a desire to fall back on genre descriptors, because people are sometimes uncomfortable experiencing things without first being told what category they fit into. I'm interested in just trying to be clear, emotionally direct and a good storyteller, without giving much thought to what is the vessel or the genre."

His stories can be inspired by any source. The texts of Kahane's much acclaimed 2006 song cycle, "Craigslistlieder," came from actual ads.

"People were writing incredibly vulnerable, confessional things in a relatively new space that was both public and private. There was a huge amount of sadness, but also a great deal of humor. The things that people were writing reminded me, strangely, of Chekhov, who was singularly brilliant in the way he could bring you to laughter and tears in the same moment."

Kahane is working on a new singer-songwriter album. "I'm still trying to build an audience. I had the great privilege of opening 40 concerts for the band Punch Brothers last year. That was such a gift, because I got to play in front of so many people. From the time that I was in my mid-20s, without really being established in these musical spheres, I was working in the theater and classical music worlds and also trying to be a songwriter. It's very difficult to get traction, when you're doing all of those different things.

"So as I live out the rest of my 30s, I'm trying to focus more on being a songwriter and having that be my calling card and then letting the other things be tangential to that."

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