Detroit-born, Hamburg-based troubadour and multi-instrumentalist Daniel Kahn and New Yorker master fiddler Jake Shulman-Ment have been playing and traveling together for nearly twenty years. Having worked in so many bands and projects (including The Painted Bird and Brothers Nazaroff), they have finally joined up to record an true analog duo record: The Building & Other Songs. It is, as Kahn says, "the most personal and intimate selection of songs I've ever recorded. And with Jake, it was like recording it with a brother."

The interpretations range from radical treatments of modern Yiddish songs such as Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman's title track "Der Binyen / The Building" to new Yiddish translations of some of Kahn's lyrical heroes: Cohen, Brecht, Springsteen, Guthrie, and Waits. Yiddish serves here as a kind of broken mirror, reflecting both despair and repair, exile and ecstasy, loss of trust and wanderlust. The title track is the key to it all: "Imagine your building… how it suddely burns and falls… a tower of steel on foundations of straw… Why sit and sigh?… Let us dance a tango till the dawn, warming our souls by the burning of straw."