Noah Kahan’s Not-That-Unlikely Everyman Stardom

How famous can a musician become and still seem like he isn't? How much musical precedent must exist — how many artists like you, coming before you — before an artist's ascent is no longer "unlikely"? These are the questions Noah Kahan's The Great Divide had me asking. 

I've written about Kahan here before, because I couldn't not. His single "Stick Season" went from midlist folk-pop to viral hit. At the time of writing this column, Kahan had 18 songs on the Hot 100. They've all been there for weeks. He also has a documentary introspecting on his fame, Out Of Body, that premiered earlier this year at SXSW and then hit Netflix. He's received a coveted folk-musician accolade, shared with veterans like Willie Nelson, Jerry Garcia, Dave Matthews and Phish: getting his own Ben and Jerry's flavor. (It helps that Kahan's from Vermont.) He also has an LL Bean collaboration — actually two of them now — and a craft beer. Where did all this come from? It's simple: As Out Of Body director Nick Sweeney told Billboard, "Noah's music was everywhere."

Is that unlikely? Kahan is a modest guy even by folkie standards. His hair is long and almost pointedly disheveled; he kind of resembles a rustic cousin of streamer MoistCritikal, or a less feral Andrew W.K. Most of his photoshoots look like he was styled by The Dude. Kahan's a lot more talkative in interviews than you'd expect, a little more fratty than you'd expect, and somehow even more self-deprecating than your expectations. He's emotionally open and vulnerable, or more precisely a vulnerability advocate. He talks constantly about going to therapy and the pressure on men to avoid their feelings, which has gotten him comparisons to the everyman anti-toxic-masculinity image of Tim Walz (a thoughtful piece that could only be written in October 2024). In short, as recent Kahan collaborator Aaron Dessner of the National told Rolling Stone: "He's the anti-idol. He's not seeking it." And yet, he found it.

Kahan's self-effacing schtick is sometimes hard to believe. In Kahan's telling, "Stick Season" was an overnight success, literally: "I ate an edible after I finished editing ["Stick Season"]," he told The New Yorker. "By the time I posted it and I realized it wasn’t getting any likes or whatever, I was too high to delete it, so I fell asleep." (Not to Geese-is-a-psyop this, but Kahan leaves some things out of this story — like the pre-existing marketing plan from digital agency the Trenches, who count Kahan as one of their biggest success stories.) In that Billboard interview, Sweeney said Kahan's documentary was not intended to coincide with his new album, despite being perfectly timed to his promotional cycle, and I had to rewind the clip to double-check whether Sweeney kept a straight face. He did.

The Great Divide, the record, projects far more assurance. The album comes in at a sprawling 17 songs, 21 if you count bonus tracks. Like Stick Season, it was written with Kahan's longtime producer Gabe Simon (no relation to Paul). Dessner cowrote a few tracks, and Bon Iver's Justin Vernon both sings on it and fills out its band. The album is small-c conservative in its folk-pop arrangements, and beholden to musical tradition. But which tradition? In 2026, anything acoustic by men will probably be compared to Mumford & Sons or the Lumineers and their retroactively assigned microgenre "stomp clap." But Kahan's music isn't quite so affectedly rustic. (Also, The Great Divide contains almost no stomping or clapping.) There's a fair amount of Springsteen here, particularly in rollicking, burly tracks like "The Great Divide" and "Deny Deny Deny." The verses of "We Go Way Back" invoke Simon & Garfunkel in their hushed harmonies; elsewhere, I hear James Taylor in a few turns of melody. Dessner and Vernon's presence is felt in the pretty drift of opener "End of August" and Carrie K's almost homeopathically faint harmonies on tracks like "Paid Time Off." 

But Kahan's real predecessors are people like Ed Sheeran (whom Kahan's compared himself to), or British folk-rocker Sam Fender (whom Kahan called his favorite modern artist), or adult-contemporary like Jason Mraz or John Mayer (both of whom Kahan also said he likes), Gavin DeGraw or Jack Johnson. You could splice his vocals seamlessly into the vocal of Isaac Slade from the Fray, or the electronized tenor of Adam Levine, or even Pat Monahan of Train (truly the Wario of this genre). This is the voice of Adult Hits Radio, the inescapable sound of waiting rooms and in-store playlists; it's also the sound of money. 

It is often hard to tell these artists apart, partly since they keep collaborating with each other; Kahan has duets with Fender, James Bay and the Lumineers. (That's James Bay and the Lumineers, simultaneously; the vibe their performance clip is... potent.) What does Noah Kahan, specifically, bring to this very crowded field? The answer, for many people, is his connection to Vermont, as if he's the state's busker laureate. Those Springsteen connections don't just come from the music; they’re rooted in his close association with a certain place. 

But while Kahan's hometown has clearly carved deep emotional trenches in his imagination, his lyrics aren't rooted in any one place. Nor do people always make a good case for that; Vermont DJ Llu described "Porch Light" on NPR by saying that "in Vermont, a porch light is really an important part of your home." (And here I thought it was the South that got precious about porches.) The phrase "The Great Divide" literally refers to the Vermont-New Hampshire border, but it also nods to another great divide that permeates Kahan's lyrics: the tension between homey but limiting small-town life and the glittering seductions of the big city; the way both places are defined by the dream of leaving one for the other; and the question of which direction means escape. This is a country-music trope; the genre has a long history of both playing it nauseatingly straight and thoughtfully deconstructing it. Kahan's lyrics wield small-town gun-shootin' almost as much as Jason Aldean's; disses like "[I hope] the streetlights bleed into your bedroom" could come from Brad Paisley or Eric Church.

Kahan's other defining trait is the way that, compared to his folk-pop cohort, his lyrics hit harder with riskier aim. He's willing to punch down, punch toward the crowd, and most of all, to punch himself. This, too, is a tradition: there's a line to be drawn from Dylan's caustic takedowns to Kahan's, and a shorter but equally bold line from his soul-scouring lyrics and those of Zach Bryan. (Kahan's songs are easier to listen to, though, given that Bryan's nasty lyrics have come to uncomfortably mirror some real-life nastiness.) But Kahan taps into the tradition remarkably well. On "Headed North," he gripes about interlopers in Cybertrucks and how they make him want to "floor it," an instantly quotable Pam Bondi-baiting lyric that unsurprisingly kicked off a promo clip Kahan posted on his TikTok. But he also gripes about local jerks with "a Coexist-in’ sticker on the bumper of their car," a description that probably describes a fair amount of his target audience. 

Kahan sings all this with conviction that is deeply emotionally felt, and the more insistent his voice grows, the more these start to sound like, as Pitchfork put it, "self-directed diss tracks." And indeed, The Great Divide has a rejoinder for almost everything said about Kahan. His public vulnerability? May you too live in vulnerable times: "I'm hoping that you open up to someone kind, and they hold it all against you," he sings on "Downfall." His ties to Vermont? On "Spoiled": "Where I'm from and what I'm worth have gotten too damn intertwined." Kahan is well aware of his sudden fame, and he writes about stardom changing him for the worse as if that's already happened. (Note: I have not seen any indications of this.) 

Most rock stars get around to their anti-fame album eventually; it's a little unusual for Kahan to do it at this point in his career. He's said that the fixation came from the fact that he just made an entire documentary grappling with his fame, which makes a lot of sense. But man, his inner critic gets really brutal: "You're not a goddamn hero now that you cry on live TV," he sings on the sneering, singsong "Haircut." This all crescendos on "Dashboard," where masses of backing vocal tracks join Kahan in shouting "You're an asshole!" It's anthemic — the closest thing to a singalong on the album — and almost proud, like a folk version of the "toast to the assholes" on Kanye and Pusha T's "Runaway." (Given that Pusha T is another one of Kahan's avowed influences, that may even be deliberate.)

All these threads intertwine on "Spoiled," the album's most subtle and thoughtful track. The song clocks in at a comprehensive five minutes. Its hymnlike melody lends it gravitas, and the slide guitars groan like cabin floorboards. For all Kahan's mentions of therapy, this song feels actually therapeutic, in the cognitive-behavioral sense: he confronts his fears at their worst, then reframes them into something more nourishing.

"Paid Time Off" hinted at the financial grind of the music business, but "Spoiled" is downright morbid: "Tell the folks at the morgue that I'm headin' back on tour." On "Haircut," he addressed the possibility of career failure in a semi-joking way, singing about how he'd be fine "even if I'm eatin' fast food and sleepin' at my dad's place." "Spoiled" fast-forwards that scenario a few years. In this telling, he now has kids, those kids are watching him wash out, and they find it pathetic: "I wanna be you, but I don't wanna be that." And this, Kahan says, is the driving motivation of his musical career: "So my children get spoiled when they get old, so they can fuck up all they want and blame it all on their dad." There's a Philip Larkin-esque resentment in this, but there's plenty of self-loathing too. And there's also love. Being a hitmaker is easy; it's this kind of emotional complexity that makes someone a songwriter.

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