"What right did I have to be so strange?" wonders Jack, the faded antihero of Marilynne Robinson's 2008 novel Home, reflecting on a life spent first trashing and then running from the semi-rural comforts that are his inheritance. Jack is a problem child grown into alcoholic instability, the prodigal son in Home's recasting of that story from Luke's gospel within the gentle, stifling atmosphere of the mid-20th century American Midwest. His return to his hometown of Gilead uncovers buried crises and instigates new ones; though Jack's destructive streak is considerable, it's the strangeness he brings, that feeling of alienation and instability, that sets the world on edge.
This is one of the messages of the Biblical tale — that however understandable a son's departure from home might be, his return will always blow up the new order that emerged after his departure. Adjustments will be torn asunder, scabs ripped off, resentments raised. "I create a kind of displacement around myself as I pass through the world, which can fairly be called trouble," Jack explains to his sister Glory. This trouble isn't so foreign to the people Jack has left as he thinks; it's as much a part of human experience as the longing for order, for peace. The return of the prodigal son simply throws its presence into focus. Then, forgiveness and healing can take place.
Noah Kahan's fourth album, The Great Divide, is a prodigal son fable that, like Robinson's, follows a man's hesitant return from the city to a small town. It inverts the story in an interesting way: Instead of a lonesome drifter slinking back after losing it all, Kahan's wanderer has conquered worlds and feels a bit outsized for the home turf he's re-entered. Like Robinson's Jack, this character — let's call him Noah, though not every song on the album is strictly confessional — destabilizes the spaces he once called home.
The Great Divide considers the displacements someone's absence creates, and the ones startled into being by someone's return. "You're here and we're so grateful you are," Kahan imagines those he's left behind saying in "American Cars," even as they caustically note his new luxury ride and fancy sunglasses. In "Haircut," a scornful friend says the opposite: "We were fine without you, baby." The disruptions caused by a loved one's reappearance, even when it's welcome, can lead to drunken brawls, harsh words that are hard to take back and tears on the mornings after.
It's an effective way for Kahan to again tackle the thorny subjects that have long preoccupied him. The poignancy that's his trademark originates within the swirl of tension caused by the conflict between the need to name trouble and the urge to forgive and forget it. His songs juxtapose ugly outbursts with loving declarations, just as, musically, they build from a tense simmer to exuberant release. Trouble can be the usual kind — too much alcohol, too little self-care, unresolved family trauma — or something less often sung about, the resentment and confusion that occurs when one person's newfound freedom reveals the stagnation afflicting another person, or even a whole community. "You tried to tell me how unfair it is / That I have what I have and you got what you got / Said I'd give it all back if I could, I cannot," Kahan sings lovingly in "Dan," about a best friend he doesn't see much anymore but is desperate to not abandon. Success creates barriers different from those which failure erects, but they're no less difficult to overcome.
This plot is central within the human saga, from The Odyssey to The Royal Tenenbaums to all of Robinson's novels (the first was even called Housekeeping). Most songs in this vein are sentimental, never moving beyond the moment of recognition when home finally comes within sight again. Among Kahan's direct predecessors, Ed Sheeran's "The Castle on the Hill" is exemplary, with its vivid imagery of teenage adventures and a kicker that downplays the dark realities facing the star's childhood friends in favor of nostalgia about what they shared. Sure, Sheeran's friends have dealt with overdoses and divorce and poverty while he's been off becoming a pop star. But that's less important than his need to reconnect. "I can't wait to go home," Sheeran roars as the song chugs along. Kahan feels the same need, but he's willing to confront what happens when he rings those doorbells again.
Song after song in the aptly titled The Great Divide considers absence and presence, stasis and mobility by engaging with various perspectives: that of Kahan's old friends, his family members, his steadfast wife and, occasionally, neighbors whose dilemmas resonate though they couldn't be more different than Kahan's own. It's a sprawling and musically variegated song suite, a "journey," as the ever-self-deprecating Kahan laughed in a short video announcing the album. The lake-dotted valley where Strafford, Vt. sits is his Gilead, the old country where his hopes and neuroses originated. Working on his ability to tell its specific stories has allowed him to move, over the course of four albums, beyond adolescent navel-gazing into the realm of the unabashedly literary songwriter elite, even as his unerring radar for earworms has also made him a pop star.
Like Jason Isbell, Bruce Springsteen and Kahan's true forefather, bard of the five boroughs Paul Simon, Kahan needs landmarks and vivid characters to make his more internal musings stick — his memories of getting high at the outlet mall are like Simon's of Julio down by the schoolyard. His success is a great reminder that specificity is what helps songs resonate to a wider audience, as fans attach their own unshakable memories to his tales of Northern hippies wearing sandalwood beads and car horn-happy summer people with "coexistence" stickers on their bumpers. "Change your zipcode, turns out you're still an a**hole," he sings in the strummy "Dashboard." Going deeply into the details of his messed-up situations, Kahan helps fans make vivid stories out of their own.
The Great Divide finds Kahan reaching for a new plateau after the runaway success of his third album Stick Season, a platinum hit whose title track was a Top 20 single of 2024, helping him gain a best new artist Grammy nomination and two sold-out nights playing Fenway Park. (The endearing new Netflix documentary Noah Kahan: Out of Body centers on those performances while sensitively addressing his ongoing struggles with anxiety and, in a rare disclosure for a male pop star, body dysmorphia.) To prove his staying power, Kahan and his now slightly expanded inner circle — most notable for the presence of balladeer whisperer Aaron Dessner on production, alongside Gabe Simon, Kahan's partner on Stick Season — aim for the musical sophistication and lyrical coherence that marks a successful singer-songwriter as a true artist rather than a lucky purveyor of tasty sound bites. Kahan's style was always eclectic, a magpie blend of light blues, country stomp and hippie noodling; Simon helped him tighten things up and grow more extroverted, more willing to make big, clear musical gestures. The Great Divide retains that boldness, but readjust the dynamics and the tempo to make room for different moods. Instead of constantly barreling forward, this album builds in pauses, relaxed stretches and turnabouts. The result is a work that feels both contained and worthy of repeated explorations.
Kahan's newfound dexterity in different musical settings allows him to paint scenes similar to those on Stick Season with more subtlety. As he's risen, Kahan has found a mission in promoting mental health awareness among his fans. A therapy kid the way some were theater kids, open about his various diagnoses and medications, Kahan developed a frame of reference that younger fans who grew up in the age of psychiatry's medicalization could instantly recognize. A modestly successful touring musician since his late teens, Kahan wrote most of Stick Season in a sibling's childhood bedroom in the home of his father, whose traumatic brain injury when the 29-year-old singer was in eighth grade permanently altered his family's life. Revisiting primal scenes in search of a breakthrough, the Kahan of Stick Season engaged in a songwriter's version of narrative psychology, seeking breakthroughs that could relieve his own anxiety and pent-up anger. Fans heard struggles they could comprehend, voiced in language they knew from being hyper-analyzed kids themselves.
As crucially, Kahan always writes his way into immediacy: His songs nearly always begin in the middle of a situation, whether it's a fight, a confession or an aimless drive that sneakily turns profound. He's conversational, careful with metaphors, always searching for the words that hit directly, without fuss. In an age that fetishizes face-to-face communication from the shrink's couch to the TikTok screen, Kahan is a master of making total strangers feel he's looking them in the eye.
The rousing chorus has been the primary vehicle for his success, which is grounded in live performance. At a Noah Kahan concert, there's no loneliness epidemic, because everyone is singing along with his leaping melodies tied to undefeatable four-chord progressions, the rocket fuel of anthemic rock. The title track of The Great Divide shows that Kahan and his producer Gabe Simon still fully intend to mine that gold; in that story of an old friend whom its narrator failed (I think it's about a queer kid damaged by a small town church experience; you might hear a different kind of rupture), the chorus breaks through like the rock Kahan imagines the damaged friend throws through a stained glass window, shattering, letting real light in. It's irresistible. But Kahan clearly knew big choruses wouldn't be enough to carry him into the next phase of his career.
Retaining Gabe Simon's services, Kahan also partnered with Dessner, the songwriter, producer and guitarist for The National who's become best known for elevating the projects of pop stars who appreciate his insights into making big pop songs feel more elegant — at once more atmospheric and more intimate. On The Great Divide, Dessner's touch helps Kahan expand his palette in ways that allow his songs, always more complicated than their big choruses suggested to casual listeners, to show their subtlety. There's a piano-driven intro, "End of August," that signals the short-story collection feel of what follows. "We're a drawing of a place, we're a photo on the fridge," Kahan's multi-tracked voice intones in what may or may not be, but should be, a deliberate echo of the Simon and Garfunkel classic "My Little Town."
That "we" points toward the Thornton Wilder-esque characters who populate the songs that follow: brothers, mothers and best friends; burnouts, blue collar workers and an imagined next generation, who will benefit and suffer from their parents' decisions. Instead of crafting portraits from a distance, Kahan does that immediacy thing with this small crowd of characters, recounting conversations about unspoken traumas, long-simmering resentments and the mutual alienation that a prodigal's return always reveals.
Dessner's status as a go-to reputation polisher aside, his presence here makes a real difference. Possibly, it pushed Simon and Kahan to take different chances in the songs they co-wrote and co-produced. If Stick Season has a flaw, it's an excess of musical labrador energy, extroverted and unsubtle. In a lot of ways, that album was the culmination of the whole stomp-clamp style that Kahan favorites The Lumineers and Mumford & Sons made popular in the 2010s, with every song driving toward a delirious sing-along. The Great Divide still delivers those punches, but it leaves room for other approaches: the soulful delicacy of "Willing and Able," the emo swagger of "Deny Deny Deny," the breezy take on Bon Iver in "Downfall." Justin Vernon, by the way, gives his blessing, playing banjo on that track and guitar on two others.
All this newfound space and variation frees Kahan to do what he does best, which is sing his heart out. While a piercing tenor and a strong falsetto is hardly new in lifting singer-songwriters to the top, Kahan has an unusually fluid and dynamic vocal facility that allows him to fully realize that immediacy he so earnestly seeks. Again, Paul Simon is the best reference point — an introspective, literary lyricist with a strong love for the fun, jumpy melodies of classic radio hits. Simon looked to the Brill Building for inspiration; The Great Divide reminds Kahan fans that before Stick Season, he was looking toward the singer-songwriter side of R&B, invoking John Legend and Corinne Bailey Rae in songs with clever rhythms and hooky melisma.
Cultivating a wider set of influences, now with the budget that really allows him to explore it, Kahan and his collaborators have made a work that earns that oft-derided description: It really is a journey. Varied dynamics and Kahan's ever-more-skilled vocals enhance his storytelling and make this long, dense album one that rewards repeat listening. There's more for him to achieve; as courageous as he is in exposing complicated personal dynamics and his own inner turmoil, he's still figuring out how to place the kitchen-sink stories of his strivers and stoners within a larger social context.
Kahan's songs have largely avoided confronting the complexities of the political moments that surround and define the internal and family traumas he finds compelling, but until now, that hasn't been a shortfall. As an older brother figure for Gen Z, he's speaking largely to fans who have grown up viewing their own salvation as a matter of self-knowledge and self-reliance, mistrusting institutions and looking to each other to help them survive in a world whose fate seems beyond their control. In "Dan," which closes The Great Divide, Kahan remembers arguments over politics he would have with that now-spectral best friend (is he alive? Unclear, in that Kahan way of blurring things in the thick of his songs). What these besties shared was loneliness: "Most of the time we don't have anyone," Kahan sings.
There's a heated debate happening right now about why young men feel that way, all tied up in attitudes about changing social roles, isolating technology, lack of economic opportunity and resentments that have hardened throughout centuries of patriarchal dominance. It's not the job of a singer-songwriter to fully illuminate such complexities. In his songs, Kahan calls forth the feeling of being overwhelmed by such outside forces, and by the ones that rise up within, rooted in internalized cultural beliefs about gender and achievement and self-worth. A simple exchange between two friends who don't necessarily understand each other, but who want to try, makes that pathos comprehensible. In the song, Kahan imagines himself remaining with Dan forever, finding a respite from the world's cruelties in the eyes of a friend with a Miller Lite in his hand. It doesn't solve anything. But it's worth returning to.
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