Sometimes we create the biggest distances in the smallest places between the people closest to us. The Great Divide, Noah Kahan’s fourth studio album, is a 17-song, 79-minute excavation of strained relationships and the distances between their participants.
Its lengthy chapters map the distance we carry within ourselves, the repellent force of familial similarity, the miles logged between tour stops and backyard beers, the physical and emotional divide that opens when someone becomes someone else, and the chasm that time puts between us and who we once were.
The Great Divide was produced primarily by Gabe Simon (Kahan’s longtime creative collaborator) alongside Grammy-winning producer Aaron Dessner, whose sensibilities are all over the album. Dessner, best known for his work with The National, Taylor Swift, and Justin Vernon, brings a patience and a structural ambition that push Kahan well beyond the Vermont folk-rock of Stick Season. Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon (Dessner’s musical partner in the band Big Red Machine) lends more than just electric guitar and vocal work on a few tracks. His influence extends well beyond his credited work.
Some may be tired of asking, answering, and/or debating the question: Is Noah Kahan ‘country?’ But it is worth noting that buried inside this album’s expansive sonic architecture are pedal steel (Eddy Dunlap), banjo, dobro, and mandolin (Dylan Jones), and fiddle (Nina de Vitry) — instruments that root The Great Divide firmly in an American folk and country tradition regardless of where the production takes it from there.
Like it or not, this is country music. But that may be a discussion for another day.
The reference material for The Great Divide includes a collection of texts spanning the canon of country, folk, rock, and popular music. The heartland strumming and emphatic chord changes over driving rhythms recall Bruce Springsteen’s The River. The oceanic, texture-heavy instrumental work and powerful, drifting melodies of The War on Drugs’ Lost in the Dream are all over “American Cars.” When this album soars, the listener can hear the cacophonous, anthemic looseness of Arcade Fire at their most wistful. And, importantly, Noah Kahan expresses pointed judgment and contempt that would make Bob Dylan’s “Idiot Wind” blush.
The album opens with “End of August,” which serves as a five-minute overture. It is a through-composed accumulation, snowballing through cynicism, sadness, self-examination, and political references without ever returning to where it started. The piano runs, like two people speaking, have a space between them, filled by the ambient animal sounds of a warm summer night. It lays bare the idea that this album will examine something simple: relationships. Kahan’s vocal here carries the Bon Iver influence most overtly: the Vernon-inspired vocal effects produce something shiny, squishy, almost rubberized, delicate but strong at the same time, much like the human beings this album is about. And underneath it all, a droning, pulsing instrumental bed that will reappear throughout the record like a recurring thought.
“Doors” thumps forward with the urgency of someone knocking on doors they can’t open themselves. “American Cars” wraps a story of broken people and broken homes in the kind of driving, nostalgic heartland rock that makes the darkness underneath easy to miss, which is exactly how Springsteen did it.
“Downfall” is the album’s most cleverly constructed song and a terrific showcase of Kahan’s prowess as a songwriter. He lets the listener in on a relationship defined by an unresolvable ambiguity – “you never really could quite place when I’m angry and when I’m joking” — and then delivers the entire song in that exact register. When he sings “I’ll keep rooting for your downfall” and “I don’t mind being your dead end,” it’s unclear whether he means it. The song performs the very Dylan-esque sardonicism that he admits made him difficult to be with. That meta-awareness elevates what could have been a straightforward spite track into something far more interesting.
The title track delivers on the promise of what a Noah Kahan hit single is supposed to sound like. Verses build, then a soaring couplet chorus that announces itself and then resolves in a parallel downward motion, the kind of anthemic construction that will be screamed back at him by thousands of people this summer. It is, by design, the most familiar thing on the record.
“Willing and Able” is the sharpest knife on the record. It captures the specific catch-22 of a tense familial relationship (or one so close and entangled that it amounts to the same thing) with awkward precision. As he writes, if you leave, you’re the asshole; if you stay, you’re going to drink and fight about things that never get resolved. And yet underneath all of it is the intention that’s too difficult to speak out loud: “I wish I could know you / wish I could do nothing with you / sit in the yard while the day dies/say I love you and mean it this time.” If only life were that simple. It is the album’s most relatable song because it recognizes that the people we are most in conflict with are often the ones we most want to be close to.
Anger and frustration give way, and underneath we discover something that’s always there: sadness. “We Go Way Back” is the album’s only pure love song, and its wistful tenderness is in stark contrast with everything that preceded it. When Kahan finally stops calling people assholes, the relief is palpable and quite beautiful. “All Them Horses,” meanwhile, is the album’s most tragic piece. It’s a meditation on the loneliness of a life spent crossing county lines with a shadow in tow, always on his own, watching everyone else stay put. Together, they expose the truth of this album: we are all just people who want to be loved and close to the ones we love.
The Great Divide will not be Noah Kahan’s most commercially dominant album. Stick Season owns that territory and likely always will. But it is his most mature, his most emotionally complex, and his most sonically ambitious. The fans who have followed him from small stages to sold-out stadiums will be devastated, inspired, and elated listening to this album. For everyone else, it is simply one of the more honest and carefully constructed records you will hear this year.
