Written by Ask his diehard fans, and Vermont songwriter Noah Kahan might have saved their life; ask skeptics, and Kahan is simply riding early-2010s stomp-clap nostalgia; ask the man himself, and Republic only signed him because he “kinda looks like Hozier.” Graduating high school with a record deal, Kahan released two records, 2019’s Busyhead and 2021’s I Was/I Am, that were indistinguishable from other grocery store musicians like James Bay or George Ezra—two artists he specifically named as influences. When the lockdowns hit, he uploaded a TikTok with the lyrics “the doc told me to travel, but there’s COVID on the plane, so I’m fucked… and I suck… you suck… and this sucks… fuck,” and his disarming honesty went viral. It resonated with a generation whose futures were put on hold, and once he cleaned up the lyrics, 2022’s “Stick Season” and its eponymous album became a massive breakthrough. As the world opened back up, he sold out Boston’s Fenway Park. Even in fluffy YouTube interviews, his bafflement comes through: On the name-that-tune series Track Star, he discusses golfing with Marcus Mumford and turns to the camera to say, “I’ve changed a lot.”
Kahan’s subject matter sets him apart from most of his adult-contemporary contemporaries, often directly mentioning an interstate highway or name-dropping a city in the New England region. His choruses are big, but his lyrics are direct and unsentimental about his upbringing: “I’m still angry at my parents for what their parents did to them,” he sings on Stick Season track “Growing Sideways.” With the mix of enjambment-heavy stream-of-consciousness and epic choruses, he’s trying to be Mumford, Jason Isbell, Scott Hutchison, and Paul Simon all at once. But, he has the most in common with British heartland rocker Sam Fender. Like Kahan, Fender’s best songs—UK smash “Seventeen Going Under” and People Watching closer “Remember My Name”—are his most personal: Their duet version of Kahan’s “Homesick,” connecting Kahan’s New England to Fender’s England, is one of the more thoughtful moments in either artist’s discography. On The Great Divide, Kahan takes after Fender like Fender takes after Bruce Springsteen, complete with Fender’s tendency to insert bars of 2/4 in his guitar riffs and his love of motorik drum patterns. Despite the maturity in the sound and lyrical content, he has a long way to go before reaching the level of his influences.
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Recorded with longtime producer Gabe Simon, Aaron Dessner, and drummer Carrie K, these are sprawling songs, breaching the five-minute mark and mostly lacking the easy shout-along choruses of songs like “Northern Attitude.” Under Dessner’s production, opener “End of August” is more complex than the entirety of Stick Season put together: As Kahan considers going off his medicine—which he characterizes as the “the feelin’ of bein’ alive/For the first time in a long time”—the vocal lines begin to overlap. The eventual catharsis comes, but like the high it describes, it’s unsustainable and it quickly recedes. Knowing that Kahan is capable of a song like “August” just makes the more pro forma arrangements on the rest of the album more frustrating.
Lots of overnight successes grapple with fame on their follow-up album, and this subject matter intensifies Kahan’s already self-effacing lyricism. Several times, he imagines others’ perspectives of him, even as he clarifies the subjects don’t actually feel this way. (He’s talked extensively about life with OCD.) As a result, a lot of the album consists of self-directed diss tracks: “Trying to run away, change your zip code/Turns out that you’re still an asshole,”goes an indicative lyric on “Dashboard.” “All Them Horses,” about the 2023 Vermont floods, contrasts celebrity life with the wreckage of his hometown: “See the rivers meet and spread like veins/Another airport lounge, another time zone change.” When it really matters, he’s unable to make it home: “I’m a sidewalk preacher with a record deal/I’m the weight of new sneakers on some dead wood.” If anything, the barbs toward an ex on “Downfall” don’t land because they don’t match the venom he reserves for himself.
The album comes with a Netflix documentary, Out of Body, where director Nick Sweeney gets Kahan to open up about his body dysmorphia and family trauma. At times, it’s difficult to watch as Kahan details his father’s traumatic brain injury or cries about his own body image. The doc’s intimacy lends gravity to the songwriting, like when Kahan explores his relationship with his siblings on “Willing and Able”: They first fight about “the childhood lie that we both had the courage to leave,” then “the childhood lie/We don’t care what the other one thinks.” It’s an effective balance, the way small comments from family members can have a whole history behind them. The more playful side of his persona comes through on “Headed North,” where he points out the irony of angry flatlanders with Coexist stickers and threatens, “If I see one more Cybertruck, I swear to God, I’m gonna floor it.”
At his best, his influences are a foundation for him to reach beyond his comfort zone. The title track is too well-written to dismiss as another Fender knockoff. Even as the references keep coming—I thought of Billy Joel’s “Piano Man” in the rhyme scheme and “James” in mourning a lost friendship—it’s Kahan’s best storytelling to date. He alludes to religious trauma (“I hope you threw a brick right into that stained glass”) and mental illness without ever spelling it out: The background wails during the climax say it all. “23” is a fictional piece that starts like any other Kahan song but gradually focuses on losing a sibling to addiction. Kahan’s narrator tries to bargain with their memories and chooses to remember the moments before the person became unrecognizable: “It can all be the way that it was/If you stay gone.” (“Paid Time Off,” another fictional song, is less successful, with the clunky extended metaphor, “Your love is like an open flame, I’m a runnin’ car, and you’re a closed garage” in its chorus.)
Across 77 minutes, the overuse of “I hope [you marry rich/you’re headed north/that the view ain’t nice]” and the reliance on heartland rock tropes become unignorable. Songs like the anxious-avoidant anthem “Doors” are a little too Wilder Mind for comfort, and the closing “Dan” feels cloying in a way he’s normally good at avoiding. Adding four additional songs into the sequencing (he warned us!) also ruins some goodwill: What sounded like a well-crafted if overlong album starts to feel like another major-label streaming dump after 21 tracks. The redundancy reminds me of how I felt when I first saw Kahan’s success: Why is this artist crossing over when wittier lyricists like Adeem the Artist and former Kahan opening act Ruston Kelly haven’t reached the same audience? But this unassuming nature is why people root for him. His music is sincere, but it’s less self-serious than Zach Bryan and more self-aware than the Hot AC that inspired him. Self-awareness means nothing without improvement: On The Great Divide, Kahan takes strides to prove he belongs.
