Noah Kahan has always been able to make listeners feel as though he’s going through the exact same things as them. In the four years since he released his career-altering Stick Season, fans have been anxiously awaiting a follow-up – but, in classic Noah fashion, few have felt this sense of anticipation as deeply as he has.
When he announced The Great Divide, Noah cryptically mused, “From a long silence forms a divide, a great expanse demanding attention”. Rarely has an album stayed true to a core theme as unwaveringly as The Great Divide, with every song contributing new, vibrant strands to the overarching patchwork.
Noah has spoken repeatedly about the crushing expectation he felt in trying to emulate the artistry of Stick Season, and it’s evident just how painstakingly the Vermont native has been poring over every detail, making this an endlessly satisfying and rewarding listening experience.
Few artists are able to craft an album with one clear, cohesive narrative, let alone one with various, intricately interwoven sub-plots and recurring characters – some that we first met on Noah’s debut seven years ago. Noah serves up a heartbreakingly bleak sequel to Stick Season’s ‘You’re Gonna Go Far’ on ‘Downfall’, as he lambasts himself for becoming Mr. Big Time, before extending this storyline by imagining what his mother would sing to him as she waits for his return on the haunting ‘Porch Light’. Then, on ‘All Them Horses’, he wonders what his hometown must think of him as he flies high above them in a jet while Vermont contends with devastating floods.
The lyrics are visceral and incisive, but crucially, they are cushioned by soaring, sweeping melodies. ‘23’ is one of most musically stunning tracks on the album, with Noah keeping us in the palm of his hand as he sings along a sparse, minimalist electric guitar riff for the first half of the song, with not a single drum in sight, before mirroring this composition on ‘We Go Way Back’. These tracks – along with ‘End of August’ and ‘Spoiled’ – are masterclasses in building towards a rousing, emphatic crescendo.
No song epitomises this as powerfully as the title-track, where Noah cuts to the heart of the project by examining a broken childhood friendship. This friendship inspires much of the project, before we reach a nostalgic and quietly hopeful conclusion with the raw, heart-rending and yet somehow uplifting ‘Dan’.
But the magic of The Great Divide is how, despite Noah lacing each song with such high levels of specificity and a wealth of Vermont-based references that nobody outside of Strafford is meant to fully grasp, he’s never really talking about one friendship, family-member or location. These are just poetic tools Noah uses as he prods and probes that “great expanse” he spoke about, and as he concretises it, we realise that it was never one single “divide”, after all. It’s the liminal space between his work-home of Nashville and his family home of Vermont; between his newfound identity as a “star” and the childhood version of himself; between two old friends; and, of course, between summer and fall.
Which is why it feels like it’s not an accident that so many of the songs in this collection follow a protagonist who is driving. Few activities summarise that feeling of being in transition and in limbo than when we are on a long drive, and by the same token, few activities leave room for such introspection. It’s yet another example of how Noah weaves unifying threads in-between all these tracks, with Kahan kicking off the album with a wistful journey as the seasons change on ‘End of August’, and he keeps on driving through ‘American Cars’, Downfall’, ‘Paid Time Off’, ‘Dashboard’, ‘Headed North’ and beyond.
There are so many more enchanting subtleties and easter eggs, such as the serendipitous bugs that endearingly rear their heads time and again, as well as Noah’s tragic, ongoing theme of bringing his dark, ominous shadow everywhere he goes (surely a hint that we’ll be getting his unreleased fan-favourite, ‘Shape of My Shadow’, before long). These details and callbacks to older material means that, on each listen, there is always a new layer to peel back. It’s the reason why, despite having heard songs like ‘The Great Divide’, ‘Doors’, ‘Spoiled’ and ‘All Them Horses’ in their entirety for the best part of two years before their release, they somehow sound more enchanting than ever.
Through The Great Divide, Noah attempts to bridge the chasm between friendship, home, family and identity, and in doing so, he traverses that other elusive, unspoken divide that has weighed him down for the past four years – the supposed, self-imposed gap between his current songwriting and that of Stick Season.
But on The Great Divide, Noah does the unthinkable and outshines his magnum opus, delving even deeper lyrically, reaching far higher thematically and expanding his boundaries sonically, to produce his finest work to date.
9.1 / 10
Maxim Mower
You can listen to my favourite from the album, ’23’, below:
Track Ratings:
1. End of August – 9.8/10
2. Doors – 9.5/10
3. American Cars – 8.8/10
4. Downfall – 9.6/10
5. Paid Time Off – 8.4/10
6. The Great Divide – 10/10
7. Haircut – 8.7/10
8. Willing And Able – 8.0/10
9. Dashboard – 8.2/10
10. 23 – 10/10
11. Porch Light – 9.8/10
12. Deny Deny Deny – 9.3/10
13. Headed North – 8.1/10
14. We Go Way Back – 9.5/10
15. Spoiled – 9.2/10
16. All Them Horses – 9.3/10
17. Dan – 9.5/10
For more on Noah Kahan, see below:
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source holler.country ’
