“My Name is Noah Kahan. My goal is to leave you a little more depressed than you came in tonight,” so he announces himself at a concert in Noah Kahan: Out of Body, the documentary shot during the making of his third album, The Great Divide. While he pokes fun at the emotional vulnerability he uses in the breadth of his art, the increasingly detailed portrait of his hometown, the joke also names the central tension of The Great Divide. If Stick Season was a tear–jerking, meditative exploration of how he was shaped by his hometown, this album is something thornier: the gap between the person writing the songs and the people living inside them. That is, the small–town people who unwittingly inspired tears from thousands of fans in sold–out arenas—a dynamic Kahan can’t quite resolve: part exploitation, part creative necessity, part something like therapy.
Stick Season lifted Kahan into the limelight as the prodigal son of Strafford, Vt. Clippable, packed with one liners, and emotionally legible in 15 seconds. The album carried a swift wisdom that is ultimately proven too simple for the much more flawed narrator on The Great Divide. On “Haircut,” Kahan puts himself in the second person, picking apart the false prophetism of his Stick Season era certainty. Almost jokingly, he sings, “you grew your hair out long and now you think you’re Jesus Christ.” There’s a chilling comfort in how lightly he wears this self–awareness; there’s a quiet honesty about the contradiction of turning other people’s lives into content and then wondering why going home isn’t the same anymore. For “Haircut,” Kahan calls back to “Carlo’s Song,” a ballad honoring a lost high school friend who passed away: Kahan in “Haircut” picks apart whether his tribute let his friend’s soul rest or if it was just for absolving his own moral guilt.
The album starts with “End of August,” a song in transit to what’s left of the past of his town. Kahan described the song as a “walk through … the woods [that] are haunted, but not by mean spirits.” The track beautifully introduces listeners to the dangers of nostalgia further explored later in the album. He returns home like a season, with chants that are agonizing in their fleetingness. The spirits talk over themselves in grainy harmonies: the residents will all vote for the same guy who wins every time, the same red light camera is still broken; in the time Kahan was on tour, his home continued on much the same and didn’t miss him. Near the end, he exhales, “everything you see out here will die,” a reflection on whether unpacking the town’s story truly matters when another generation inherits the same problems.
But hauntingly, he announces, “everything you see out here will die.” The only scary thing about the spirits in Strafford is that they probably don’t remember who he is.
The Great Divide is sewn together by I–89, the interstate that leads Kahan home to Vermont. A significant portion of the songs take place in cars—not a new metaphor for Kahan—but the album’s relationship to motion runs deeper than setting—it paints window pictures, fleeting stories, relationships, and moments that only remain for as long as you’re willing to slow down. On the ballad “Dashboard,” Kahan rambles that “it’ll hurt half as much if you drive twice as fast,” capturing something the whole record is quietly guilty of: how easy it is to outrun the place that made you, right up until you can’t. He knows this about himself and he knows it makes him an “asshole.” Yet, the self–awareness doesn’t prevent him from stepping on the gas pedal.
The title does a lot of the work. Biblically, the Great Divide is the gulf between those who believe in salvation and those who don’t—“Luke 16,” the uncrossable chasm. On the title track, Kahan writes very unflinchingly about a friend who “slowly inched” across that divide, pushed out by a church and a community that had no room for his sexuality, as is suggested by the music video. Alternatively, or perhaps concurrently, “the Great Divide” is what separated Kahan from a friend that needed help. Much like Lazarus, who faced damnation for walking by a poor man every day without helping him, Kahan admits it was “shitty and unfair…to stare straight ahead like everything was fine” when his friend needed support. In a non–biblical sense, “the Great Divide” functions as the distance between the town whose stories made him famous and the artist that sells out arenas; the distance between himself and those to whom he owes an apology; it’s the gap between growth and calcification.
On “All Them Horses,” Kahan reminisces on a flood that hit his community in 2011 via Tropical Storm Irene, but also on the little and the large things that keep him from home. His first obstacle: there’s too much rain on the roads. His second: he’s made too much noise. While Kahan can raincheck a visit home and blame the weather, our flawed narrator is ultimately grappling with guilt for the exploitative way he has used his hometown in his art. He describes himself as a “sidewalk preacher with a record deal,” his most poignant illustration of the guilt that accumulated while he used art about his home to figure himself and his own problems out—all while those he left behind might call him ridiculous.
At its most unsettling, the divide is not that great at all, because the same old, toxic patterns are right there with the same lessons ready to be learned all over again. On “Downfall,” Kahan prays the worst for someone who is onto bigger and better things, knowing when the worst eventually comes that they’ll come back and sit in stillness with him once again. Similarly, the second single “Porch Light” subverts his perspective, acknowledging that he’s been letting down someone who will always make room for him in their life. On the defeatist repetition of “I’m alone” in the first prechorus, Kahan most intimately elegizes the hole his absence creates for his home, lulling in what has become routine.
Sonically, the album leans harder into the folksy end of Kahan’s careful tread between folk and pop. “Paid Time Off” and “Heading North” are almost campfire songs—the kind that would feel at home on a porch in a place where winters are long and everyone knows everyone’s business. Save for the lush production of “American Cars,” “Dashboard,” and “Deny Deny Deny,” the album is evidence of how much more Kahan trusts his voice and lyricism today—the illustrious instrumentation that sometimes threatened to crowd him out on Stick Season steps back here, and there’s an effective reliance on his intonation. His voice on The Great Divide takes the lead and expounds upon its emotional power here; at times it’s furtive in his condemnation of himself, wispy when something is hard to admit, and even resonant enough to stop one in their tracks.
The album also knows what it likes: cigarettes, drinking too much, bugs that don’t live past September, medication as some broad allusion to emotional strife. These metaphors do real work the first several times, but start to strain later. When Kahan finds a fresh angle—the title track, “Doors,” the quietly devastating “23”—it lands. However, stretches of the album work as one long song, drawing from the same playbook and hammering in the same message. This choice is, perhaps, appropriate on such a ruminous and reflective album: but we should remember that this comes in a long tradition of ruminous, reflective, and perhaps, repetitive albums. Still, his personality weaves the album together. Until the very last track, Kahan is refreshingly humble, piercingly empathetic, and conversational. Who can blame anyone for repeating themself after a few—maybe more than a few—drinks?
The Great Divide is not a pivot. Seasons change and come back, and each time the return feels a little different—weighted by everything accumulated since the last one. What this album adds to Kahan’s body of work is the humility to wonder whether the story he’s been telling was entirely his to tell, and the willingness to sit with that question for 17 songs without ever resolving it. He’s going to make you a little more depressed than when you came in—and for now, that’s still enough.
