Album of the Week: Noah Kahan – 'The Great Divide'

The importance of being earnest: it’s bread-and-butter for the songwriting, and songcraft, of Noah Kahan. And it’s the reason why the American folk-rocker’s impassioned, sing-every-word, feel-all-the-feels fanbase grew exponentially with the third album that, finally, broke him. Broke him in, to some extent, both senses.

The formerly struggling singer-songwriter, who grew up on a tree farm in Vermont, cut through, and then some, with 2022’s Stick Season. It was a Covid-born album of connection and community that hymned the beauty of going home, staying there and leaning into the stark, autumnal/wintry majesty of the titular time of year.

Before he knew it, Kahan had racked up 15 billion streams; was a superstar in old England as well as New England; had sold out a pair of nights at storied Boston baseball stadium Fenway Park; and, three albums in, was nominated for Best New Artist at the Grammys.

All of which, unsurprisingly, caused a little local difficulty for an unassuming home-buddy who had long been open about the mental health challenges that had propelled him to set up his own foundation, The Busyhead Project (they’ve so far raised $6.6m to help those with similar challenges). Not for nothing is a new feature-length Netflix documentary called Noah Kahan: Out of Body. As he tells the cameras: “[I] always have felt physically ugly and facially ugly, mentally ugly… I don’t know what I look like. No clue.” One can scarcely imagine the dysmorphic disconnect when you know that, on your next, instantly sold-out tour, over one million people will be staring at that ugly mug.

Now, on The Great Divide, Kahan digs into all that: earnestly, lengthily, over 17 songs. At its most powerful, he’s bare-faced and open-hearted. On ‘Porch Light’, with its banjo-driven gallop, he addresses the turmoil he caused his divorced parents by talking about them onstage and in interviews. “Whatever made you famous, made you sick,” he sings in the voice of his mother, “but you can only do what pain allows… There ain’t no shame in calling this thing quits”.

On the surging, rousing 'Doors', he talks again of childhood and isolation and dynasty and feelings handed down: “I grew up pretending sticks were little guns, I would point ’em at my dad and he’d get mad, ’cause God forbid I hurt someone, I’d hurt anyone I could, anyone who got too close and anyone who wouldn’t look, I was born into a 100-year-storm…”

Certainly Kahan can write a tune. The Great Divide’s title track is a foot-stomping anthem occupying the middle ground in a Venn diagram overlap of Arcade Fire and Mumford & Sons. ‘American Cars’ is a mandolin-powered rerub of Born in the USA-era Bruce Springsteen.

More interesting, though, more sticky, is ‘Downfall’. It's a more delicate, finely wrought, baroque-folk song that betrays the clear influence of one of its co-writers, The National’s Aaron Dessner. The musician, who’s worked similar woodsy wonders with Taylor Swift and Bon Iver, hosted Kahan at his Long Pond Studio in upstate New York (there were also sessions in Nasvhille), and he’s well-represented here. He's co-producer of ‘Willing and Able’ and ‘Spoiled’. And, as well as ‘Porch Light’, he’s co-writer/producer of ‘End of August’, the wondrous, spacey, alive-to-the-seasons-again piano ballad that opens the album (“the minute that September hits, I’m going off my medicine”). He performs the same role on the closing ‘Dan’, another long, lyrical, song, this one about friendship, loss, the good old days and the bad old days, a Stephen King short story cast in elegiac, country-music tones.

More of that, please, and less of The Great Divide’s overly long, default setting. Too often, that’s a polished, route-one/Route 66 take on adult-oriented rock – a genre very well-represented on these near-dozen-and-a-half tracks. Too many of those songs seem purpose-built for the venues that this beardy long-hair and campfire-friendly folky now, unfathomably, finds himself playing. But maybe when you’ve done 17 billion album streams – and spent too long stuck in stick season – you can’t help but be a bit less cabin in the woods and a good bit more stadium in the ’burbs.