The 29-year-old singer-songwriter Noah Kahan is at once a landscape artist and a self-portraitist, fixated on the connection between the place where he grew up and the person he has become.
“Stick Season,” the chattery 2022 folk-pop hit that made him a star, used a barren, pre-winter period specific to New England’s climate as a metaphor for a dreary in-between time in his emotional life: “I love Vermont, but it’s the season of the sticks,” he sang — a declaration of ambivalence written during a Covid-era move back to his childhood home that would soon be shouted back to him from arena stages.
On “Homesick,” a lilting ballad from the same album, Kahan put it even more plainly: “I’m mean because I grew up in New England.” The rest of Kahan’s music, though, exposes that line as a self-deprecating lie. Try as he might to sound prickly, Kahan’s voice as a songwriter is characterized by his nice-guy sensitivity. In “Noah Kahan: Out of Body,” a candid Netflix documentary released ahead of his new album, “The Great Divide,” a neighbor from his sleepy hometown, Strafford, Vt., considers that line with a laugh. “I’m not mean, I don’t think,” she says, and then scrunches up her nose. “Yeah, he’s not mean either.”
Kahan has certainly not made a full heel turn on “The Great Divide,” but his perspective has sharpened and matured. Like the “Stick Season” LP, he co-produced it with the musician Gabe Simon, but he also worked on some of the new album’s more atmospheric material with Aaron Dessner, the National multi-instrumentalist who has become the producer that pop stars like Taylor Swift and Gracie Abrams call when they want to go contemplatively acoustic. As a vocalist, Kahan has grown a bit less coy, deepening a range that can leap from a low, brooding croon to a luminous, Bon Iver-ian falsetto.
The sprawling album takes as its central premise a topic that has led many a singer-songwriter down a path of unrelatable self-indulgence — grappling with sudden fame — but Kahan is unsparing enough to make it work. “We’ll see you again in six months when you need your next song,” he sings on the affecting acoustic number “Willing and Able,” in the voice of loved ones who feel their lives have been strip mined for material. The biting folk-rocker “Haircut” skewers his own savior complex (“You grew your hair out long, now you think you’re Jesus Christ”), while the agitated, mandolin-driven “Porch Light” considers whether it is worth continuing a career in which “whatever made you famous makes you sick.”
Kahan’s music teems with the verbose internal dialogues of an anxious mind, but his lyrics often evince a kind of therapized wisdom. (Of the most prominent American dude singer-songwriters currently walking in the shadow of Bruce Springsteen, Kahan sounds more convincingly tortured than Bleachers’ Jack Antonoff but less likely than Zach Bryan to get in a fistfight.)
He pokes and prods at the repressive dictates of masculinity on songs that interrogate complicated relationships with fathers, brothers and mutely troubled friends. He’s a font of empathy on the soaring title track and lead single, which reconsiders a God-fearing childhood pal whose pain Kahan previously underestimated. Stomping percussion and a rippling electric guitar riff help Kahan’s sentiment to soar.
This is driving music in more than one sense — its tempos and rhythms have a persistent forward momentum, but also a lot of these narratives take place inside vehicles, during long, ruminative journeys from the middle of nowhere to someplace else. “Something ’bout the window seat’s got you feeling like a poet,” Kahan sings on the warm but wounding “Downfall,” a finely realized song about hoping someone’s expedition out into the wider world fails, so that they can return home and keep the narrator company.
Some of the album’s strongest moments are its forays into rollicking heartland rock, like the anthemic “American Cars” and the self-deprecating “Dashboard,” which laments the fact that you take yourself — and your neuroses — wherever you go: “Change your ZIP code, turns out that you’re still an asshole,” Kahan howls on a lurching chorus that, like “Stick Season” before it, sounds destined for cathartic shout-alongs in concert.
Over the long haul — 17 tracks — Kahan’s somewhat limited sound and perspective can grow repetitive. He hammers home certain signature concerns (self-destructive drinking; variations on the word “medication” as a vague stand-in for emotional strife) to excess. Two of the first four songs feature lines about bugs dying as a way of marking seasonal time. But Kahan manages to find more distinct imagery on the charmingly homespun highlight “Headed North,” an acoustic ditty that pokes gentle fun at such local annoyances as small-town cops, a sudden influx of Cybertrucks, and short-tempered hypocrites with “Coexist” bumper stickers.
“I’m betting on the North to drag my ass back down to Earth,” Strafford’s most famous prodigal son sings toward the end of this album, finding the cure for what ails him in the most obvious place. Who says you can’t go home?
Noah Kahan “The Great Divide” (Mercury)
Lindsay Zoladz is a pop music critic for The Times and writes the music newsletter The Amplifier.
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