A smash hit breakthrough album like Noah Kahan’s Stick Season is a really hard act to follow. I've never stepped foot in a megachurch as an adult, but seeing Kahan perform at the Hinterland Festival twice on the heels of that record was like mass worship — the packed crowd had tears in their eyes, arms extended to the sky as they sang and swayed along to the songs they knew like gospel music.
On his fourth album, The Great Divide, Kahan has crafted yet another holy grail, especially for those whose life stories mirror Kahan’s. Anyone who's left their small hometown, deconstructed the religion they inherited from their parents, made something of themselves and come back home to a familiar place they seem to have outgrown will relate with this album. It's perfect for anyone who only slips into their childhood twang when they’re back for a bittersweet homecoming.
The Great Divide‘s title track was an excellent choice for a lead single, and is the first of many literal and figurative conversations Kahan has with characters from his childhood throughout the album as a whole. This song’s conversation is held with an old connection, burdened with religious trauma, that Kahan wishes freedom upon as he sings “I hope you throw a brick right into that stained glass,” and more bluntly, “I hope you’re scared of only ordinary shit / Like murderers and ghosts and cancer on your skin / And not your soul and what He might do with it” — note the capital H in that last line about damnation.
I could quote “The Great Divide” for days on end, but on what must’ve been my twentieth listen, I kept coming back to the pre-chorus and the genius simplicity of how Kahan describes the everyday tragedy of religion-based self-suppression: “You know I think about you all the time / And my deep misunderstanding of your life / And how bad it must’ve been for you back then / And how hard it was to keep it all inside.”
Not every conversation Kahan has in The Great Divide is with the person who's left the small town. Songs like “Haircut” and “Dashboard” seat Kahan across from people who think the hometown is better off without him, with scathing lines like “You grew your hair out long / Now you think you’re Jesus Christ” and “Change your ZIP code / Turns out you’re still an asshole.” Kahan, an outspoken mental health advocate forced to reckon with a meteoric rise to fame, juggles insecurity, regret, shame and disappointment so eloquently throughout this album.
Despite the difficult nature of some of these talks, Kahan is eager to have them. He points out the elephant in the room with his family on “Willing And Able” and “Deny Deny Deny.” Substance abuse and Kahan’s broken childhood home has come up plenty in his discography before, but he’s face-to-face with his old demons more than ever on The Great Divide. An early track on the album, “Doors,” vulnerably approaches his trauma and anger. Later on the record, “All Them Horses” poetically tackles the imposter syndrome that he still experiences today. Keep in mind, Kahan is now a now-Grammy-nominated, multi-platinum musician!
You can’t visit your small hometown without getting a little Americana about it. “American Cars” postures Kahan’s characters in a blue collar light as if he was Bruce Springsteen, and “Paid Time Off” is a coming-of-age leaving-home love story à la Simon and Garfunkel’s “America” or The Avett Brothers’ “I And Love And You.” “Paid Time Off’s" description of getting high at the outlet mall is a narrative that small town natives like myself know all too well. Memories of my rural upbringing particularly hit during the hypocritical small town gossip in “Headed North.” There are plenty of people I’ve said my own version of “It’s gone to shit without you / It was shit before, but at least I had you” to, and the Coexist bumper sticker shoutout gave me a laugh. I once felt like mine was the most radical thing my little Iowa town had seen!
Even after you’ve had your coming-of-age, rags-to-riches tale in the big city, there’s nothing quite like coming home and sharing a drink with the people who you grew up with. Kahan seems to treasure those conversations the most on “We Go Way Back” and the touching closing track, “Dan.”
“Let’s talk about high school and let’s talk about death,” Kahan tells his best friend Dan, reminiscing over campfire beers he compares to heaven. Kahan calls out in the song that, in many ways, he has changed so much from the insecure kid who drove those country roads so many years ago. There are plenty of differences between who he is now and the many different familiar faces he talks to in this album, including Dan. But, despite the very complicated relationship he has with this place and its people, Kahan’s upbringing is at the core of who he still is today, and he sums up coming to terms with that realization perfectly.
The record’s producer, Aaron Dessner, has possibly become better known for his esteemed Long Pond Studio than his monumental work in the band The National. Long Pond Studio has birthed recent indie folk great albums like Taylor Swift’s folklore and evermore, Mumford and Sons’ latest Prizefighter album and now, The Great Divide. Sonically, The Great Divide features Kahan’s unmistakable signature sound, something I like to call “softcore stomp and holler,” complete with grand indie folk crescendos and major "y’allternative" moments throughout. Kahan also worked with Stick Season collaborator Gabe Simon on the new album and even Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon.
The Great Divide is beautiful, and I knew I would love it from the very first sound of the opening track, “End of August.” Kahan starts the album off with the sound of cicadas at dusk in late summer, a sound that instantly transported me back to the farm I grew up on in rural Iowa. My mind and my heart remained in my small town as Kahan told me all about his. I know plenty of people’s lives have followed a similar path, and for those whose paths are different there's still something to connect on in The Great Divide.
