Red Letter Days

In which we release a new single in anticipation of an off-Broadway run at Playwrights Horizons in NYC

Hello friends, hello strangers.

There are so many things I want to tell you about: the books I’ve been reading; the tomatoes in our garden; the long flight to Australia; the tragicomic vagaries, pleasures, and humiliations of raising two small children; major and minor revelations in middle-age. But I have some more mundane things to discuss with you today!

First, I have a new single out today. It’s called “Red Letter Days,” and was written in the same batch of tunes—composed in the final month of a year-long hiatus from the internet—that led to ‘Magnificent Bird.’ It’s a song I’ve loved playing live, and I’m delighted to share it with the world.

cover art by John Gall

This song’s release arrives in tandem with tickets going on sale for my off-Broadway run at Playwrights Horizons, for which I will be performing new, theatrical productions of ‘Magnificent Bird’ and ‘Book of Travelers,’ directed by my wonderful colleague, Annie Tippe. It’s an extremely limited run, from September 24th to October 6th, so I recommend getting tickets as soon as possible.

I’ll be doing the shows on alternating nights, with double-headers on the weekends for those with a penchant for binging weird pop songs interwoven with funny/sad stories.

The pairing of these pieces is not arbitrary. My decision to take a year off the internet, which was the animating impulse for ‘Magnificent Bird,’ grew out of the experiences I had traveling the U.S. by train—without phone or internet—in the aftermath of the 2016 election, a journey I chronicled in ‘Book of Travelers.’ In both pieces, I’m trying to better understand the ways in which, for all of the marvels of digital connectivity, Americans are lonelier, more atomized, and more politically and culturally divided than ever. These are not new observations. But my hope is that by immersing myself in these phenomena, in the movement toward unfamiliar bodies, lives, ways of being, and away from digital mediation and the received interpretations of contemporary life that we ingest through social, new, and legacy media, perhaps my perspective will provide something fresh.

With all of that said, I would be thrilled to see you at Playwrights Horizons next month. Thank you, as always, for reading, and to those who are paying subscribers, for your support in making this newsletter possible.

—Gabriel