A few songs into his show, Noah Kahan introduces himself: “My name is Noah Kahan. And I’m here to make you very, very, very unhappy!”
Well, you wouldn’t know it by the screams and the smiles on everyone’s faces. And we had every reason to be unhappy, when you think about it! The singer-songwriter’s July 27 concert at Truist Park started in the middle of an ongoing heat advisory, over 40,000 people stuck in a boiling pit of a stadium – sweaty, sticky, dehydrated beyond belief. The clothes I wore are still on my floor, and I may never get the stench of dirty baseball field off of them.
And yet, despite the heat – and despite Kahan’s penchant for singing honestly about addiction, loss, anxiety, anger, loneliness, and everything in between – all 40,000 people in that stadium were happy.
There’s a certain type of catharsis that comes with a Noah Kahan concert. Yes, the music covers heavy topics – and this most recent album, “The Great Divide,” is a particularly interesting exercise in guilt and self-flagellation. But, the experience of letting all those dark feelings out somehow feels intimate, despite being surrounded by thousands of other people. In his performance, Kahan exemplifies the tension that’s always existed when small town musicians are suddenly able to sell out stadiums.
After two stellar openers in Annabelle Dinda and Gigi Perez, Kahan hit the stage at about 8:30 p.m. and played for two and a half hours, cycling through a good chunk of the new album and past hits. The set design drew attention to the conflict that Kahan explicitly deals with in his music – a literal house backdropped by video screens fading in and out between signifiers of the New England environment Kahan hails from and live feeds of Kahan and his – frankly – elite band. I lost count of how many times I spotted someone playing a new instrument from the song before.
That cozy feel was bolstered by Kahan’s openness. He became visibly emotional during numerous songs and openly talked about mental health during the show, at one point jokingly asking the crowd what medications we were on when we didn’t seem sad enough for his liking (he continuously warned the crowd that listening to Noah Kahan songs might bring up unwanted, dark emotions). He immediately developed a familiarity with the crowd that could make you forget just how large the space we were sharing together is – until, the projection screens would flash to a shot of Kahan from behind and you’d see the flashing lights and the massive crowd.
Kahan, both in person and in song, can’t really seem to believe the meteoric rise in stardom he’s experienced over the past few years. Ahead of “Orbiter,” a ballad about how the people you love keep you grounded amid constant chaos (in this case, fame), Kahan talked about how he could have never imagined being in this position mere years ago. He was self-aware and self-deprecating throughout the show (“I do look like a youth pastor,” he said at one point. “And frankly, the music makes me sound like a youth pastor, as well.”)
But the songs themselves are a little less cavalier, filled with self-loathing and a sense of anger – anger at himself, anger at the people back home, then at himself again for daring to be angry with them. Songs off the new album, like the title track, or “Downfall,” or “Haircut,” or “Dashboard,” which Kahan explicitly called a song about being a bad person, all deal with his anxiety over his own good fortune and the way he’s told stories about where he comes from to get there.
“Help me if it helps you sleep,” he croons during the chorus of “Haircut,” mimicking someone from back home disparaging his good intentions as selfish. In “Dashboard,” he yells: “Change your zipcode, turns out that you’re still an a*shole.” All this fame doesn’t make him a better person or change who he is – he still feels like the same anxious kid from back then.
The strength of these songs (especially live, delivered with stalwart conviction by the person who wrote them) is that they give us all permission to feel all those bad feelings about ourselves – all the fear, all the insecurity, all the rage – and throw it back at the world. Kahan might be the same as he ever was, but his musical evolution is all about reckoning with his different circumstances.
His last album, “Stick Season,” is about a small town kid dealing with small town pains – and let me tell you, hearing the lyrics to “The View Between Villages” five miles down the road from your childhood home certainly hits different. But with “The Great Divide,” Kahan is no longer just reckoning with the ways in which he has been hurt by his upbringing, but also the hurt he fears he might have done by leaving – and inviting us all to live in that pain alongside him.
