The new album from Noah Kahan opens with two dudes driving. “They don’t say a lot, but they know every inch of this ride,” Kahan sings atop a tense ambient wash of autumnal prettiness on “End of August,” mapping out a sense of angst and empathy that’ll become all too familiar before the rest of tracks on The Great Divide, which is out Friday, have had their say. The New England town where these guys live doesn’t have much to offer beyond a future of having kids “who grow up and have kids who build homes for the rich.” To dull the dullness, there are meds that don’t work and memories that don’t heal, and the uncomfortably comforting sense that at least you know you’re not arrogant enough to imagine any other reality. “Everything you see out here will die,” Kahan sings as the song surges toward a beautifully forlorn folk-rock epiphany. “And it’s ours now.”
Imagine a stadium full of people locking into that sentiment, as they surely will this summer when Kahan plays multiple nights at venues like Fenway Park and Citi Field, and you’ve got the indelible appeal of an artist who has spun his small-town ambivalence and early-adulthood apprehensions into massive success (a process captured in the strong new documentary Noah Kahan: Out of Body). A few years ago, Kahan was a guy from Vermont waiting out Covid by writing songs — one of which, the heartsick meditation “Stick Season,” became a hit tied to a breakout 2022 LP of the same name. Now, he’s up there with the Sheerans and Bryans of the world, working a similar regular-guy appeal that makes his stardom something to root for.
The long-awaited Great Divide, co-produced by Kahan, Stick Season assist man Gabe Simon, and Aaron Dessner (the sad-folk Phil Spector), adds top-shelf studio juice to Kahan’s confessional songwriting and improves on its predecessor in other ways. “Doors” sets the ambitious tone early on with a wide-open Americana-rock heft that could win a shoulder-smack of approval from Tom Petty or Bruce Springsteen. Kahan’s music is a smart synthesis of Bon Iver’s ethereal falsetto indie-folk, Zach Bryan‘s everyman storytelling, Mumford & Sons’ acoustic stomp, and a Taylor Swiftian eye for lyrical detail, not to mention well-constructed bridges — all carefully weaved, well-wrought, and rendered with a tasteful light touch and a real pop sensibility. It’s a sensitive backdrop to lyrics about people navigating strained relationships and real hardships in an America where just keeping your life on solid ground is a gold-medal achievement.
On “Paid Time Off,” a down-home acoustic guitar and banjo are the backdrop for lyrics that contrast youthful images of freedom and having fun with a more honest assessment of where midlife takes you: “I had the brains for a city job/But you got the taste of a county cop,” Kahan sings tenderly. The sweeping rocker “American Cars” is about helping someone close to you deal with their pain. In “Dan,” two old friends get together to camp and drink and have good-natured political debates that may or not stay good-natured as the Miller Lites pile up. Kahan wrestles with addiction on “23,” and “Deny Deny Deny” is a forensically detailed catalog of personal illusions and slights that culminates in the line “I’m far too tired to watch you lie/So let’s just watch TV.”
Unsurprisingly, Kahan’s newfound success and his guilty distance from the small-town world he left behind is a major theme on The Great Divide. One especially rough moment along those lines is “Porch Light,” a catchy song with an early-2010s folktronica pulse in which Kahan has a heated phone call with a family member who’s mad he’s gotten rich spinning tales about the folks back home without asking their consent. In “Dashboard,” a guy tears a new one into an old friend who got out and hasn’t looked back — “Change your ZIP code/Turns out that you’re still an asshole.” The cathartically hard-strumming, fiddle-swept “Haircut” hands the mic to the guy who got out and made it, so he can argue “some small fame ain’t made me someone else.”
These songs are impressive because they rarely sound like rich rock-star solipsism; they’re conversations with the past, in which the past talks back in the voice of actual people you may or not always miss, but actually love and can’t forget. On “Spoiled,” the well-off rock-star future doesn’t look so hot, either — he sings about working his ass off while already knowing the children he hasn’t had yet are going to live off his success and blame him for their failures.
You’ve gotta like a guy whose distaste for rich people extends to preemptively resenting his own pampered children who aren’t even born yet. That level of unshielded honesty and hunger for connection is one reason millions of people can read their lives and stories into Kahan’s songs. “You know I think about you all the time/And my deep misunderstanding of your life,” he sings on The Great Divide’s soaring title track, reaching out to one of the many people he hates losing touch with. He’s going to have a lot of years in the game and sold-out baseball parks to figure out how you fill in that elusive space between.
Jim Adkins performs with Jimmy Eat World at Warped Tour in D.C.Mike Kimchi for Rolling Stone
