Hailed by The New Yorker as “one of the finest, most searching songwriters of the day,” Gabriel Kahane has often approached his work from the vantage point of an observer. But now, for the first time since 2011’s Where are the Arms, he’s telling his own story. With Magnificent Bird, his fifth solo LP and second album for Nonesuch Records, Kahane brings to life a trunk of songs written in self-imposed isolation—a full year off the internet—with the help of a dozen colleagues, including Andrew Bird, Chris Thile, Sylvan Esso’s Amelia Meath, and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw, whose long-distance contributions were made possible, paradoxically, through the very technology he had shunned.