Yesterday, Noah Kahan posted on X: “Reviewers saying the albums too long shit I don’t think it’s long enough.” Seeing as The Great Divide clocks in at a whopping 77 minutes across 17 songs, you can imagine where the criticism might come from. Length isn’t inherently a bad thing. There’s little better than an album that earns its long runtime, that takes a long enough journey through varied enough sounds to justify an hour-plus listen. Unfortunately The Great Divide, the much-awaited follow up to Kahan’s 2022 breakout Stick Season, doesn’t quite hit that mark. It’s never bad, per se—just thematically, sonically, and lyrically redundant. And that’s the problem with length, sometimes: what could’ve been a great track individually loses its power when surrounded on all sides by others like it. Here, the songs bleed together, and also into Stick Season, which The Great Divide stands up against but doesn’t move forward from.
There are only so many ways you can sing about leaving your small town, finding fame, and feeling guilty about it, and Noah Kahan certainly finds them all—and then some. The gorgeous piano ballad “End of August” opens the album with him following “New York plates to the county line” and painting his hometown as “a place where most kids / Just grow up and have kids / … / Who build homes for the rich,” leaving the obvious unstated: Kahan is not most kids. He himself has become “the rich.” The more rock-inspired “American Cars” seems to fantasize about receiving a hero’s welcome upon his return home, his neighbors marveling at his newly fancy cars and fancy shades but ultimately overjoyed that he’s come back. The lyrical standout “Haircut” ends up brutally dashing that daydream, taking on the perspective of a resentful old friend for much of the track: “You walked into a haunted house and got angry at the ghosts / We were fine without you, baby, long after you’re gone / Spare us all the pity, love, save it for the microphone.”
But the sentiment grows stale when it stops moving forward, developing, or deepening. Kahan just repeats himself, again and again. The very next song, “Willing and Able” pulls the exact same trick in its second verse, the speaker (once again a jilted ex-friend) biting out an almost identical argument: “Look at you leavin’ again, it’s all you know how to do / … / They all say you’re a light, all I see is the shadow / And I’ll see you again in six months when you need your next song.” Bafflingly, “Dashboard” decides to make it a hat-trick, becoming the third song in a row to crucify Kahan for leaving town and finding fame, and doing it in the exact same way: “Look at you go, crossing state lines with your shadow / … / Turns out that you’re still an asshole.” Maybe the following track, “23,” is about something else in general (addiction, most likely), but in the context of the songs preceding it, that post-chorus of “Stay gone / Won’t you stay gone?” feels all too familiar.
“Porch Light” is another entry into the same thematic canon, except—unlike the songs immediately preceding it—it does take a new tack, hit a new emotional beat. Kahan sings from the point of view of his mother here, wishing he would stop seeking fame by spilling his loved one’s secrets in his music and instead just come home. It’s a knife to the heart: “I’ll leave the porch light on / Heartbroken, each morning when it’s me that turns it off.” Except I can’t help but wish Kahan let the song err on the rawer, rougher side—or, really, let any song veer into that territory. His voice is always crystal clear and processed, the production is always polished, and the arrangements are always perfectly neat. No matter how vulnerable a track gets, it’s hard to fully buy into the emotion when it feels so safely protected in its own sheen. “Porch Light” might be one of the worst offenders, though; the chorus is so heartbreaking on the page, but in the ears, Kahan’s falsetto inexplicably calls to mind Maroon 5 era Adam Levine.
Kahan blessedly grants us a bit of a reprieve from this theme with the rare more up-tempo number “Deny Deny Deny” and the love song “We Go Way Back,” but “Headed North” errs a bit too close to the same old tune for comfort, and “Spoiled” plans on, yes, heading north in order “to drag my ass back down to Earth / ‘Cause where I’m from and what I’m worth have gotten too damn intertwined.” Penultimate song “All Them Horses” is a slow acoustic ballad that chronicles Kahan’s guilt at not being around during the floods that terrorized his home state of Vermont in 2023, self-flagellating with the same too-worn whip. We’re 16 songs in. You don’t need to tell us that you “crossed the county line” and “cannot go back”; we know. And closer “Dan,” for all its candor about the impossibility of maintaining relationships with once-peers when you hit the big time, hits a lot less hard after 72 minutes of Kahan describing exactly that. I get the album is about “the great divide” between past and present, rich and poor, fame and anonymity, friend and stranger, but do we need to hammer it in this much?
The songs themselves aren’t bad, nor are the lyrics—although there is something to be said for Kahan’s over-reliance on literalism, with his few forays into the world of figurative language always leaving something to be desired. It’s well-established metaphors and cliche idioms all the way down: “In that dark, and in that frost, a heart was formed / Malcontented and unwarm”; “Have you ever stared directly at the sun?”; “I cut the tension with a knife”; “Make the house a home”; “Your love is like an open flame”; “Like the world just restarts, like the clock just resets.”
Kahan is also a bit too tickled by the same motifs: dead bugs, driving, copper mines, demarcated lines, driving, substance abuse, cold weather, and have I mentioned driving? (Some variation of the word “drive” crops up 15 times. That’s not even counting “ride,” “road,” “car,” “speed,” you name it.) But even so, when Kahan writes well, he writes well. “We Go Way Back” boasts one successful metaphor, at least, in “Heaven is a drink in the backyard.” “Porch Light” is brilliantly devastating, as is “The Great Divide,” where Kahan sings to an old friend he never understood properly and has since grown away from: “I hope you’re scarеd of only ordinary shit / Like murderers and ghosts and cancer on your skin / And not your soul and what He might do with it.” It’s one of the only songs that doesn’t feel directly explicit about its subject and its meaning, and it’s more compelling for it. The space between the lines allows for interpretation, for listeners to place themselves within it.
Perhaps the lyrical and thematic sameness could be hidden partially behind varied arrangements and distinct melodies, but unfortunately, that’s rarely the approach Kahan and his collaborators, Gabe Simon and Aaron Dessner, take. Kahan’s words—and the croon he couches them in—remain at the center of attention; that’s his selling point, after all. But around the album’s halfway point, the alternating stomp-clamp-hey anthems and thoughtful-guy-with-a-guitar ballads start to have diminishing returns, especially when they don’t even alternate. “Headed North,” “We Go Way Back,” and “Spoiled” are back-to-back stripped-down acoustic songs that feel virtually indistinguishable from one another. There are few, if any, memorable hooks throughout. The structure almost never changes either: verse, pre-chorus or post-chorus, chorus, verse, pre-chorus or post-chorus, chorus, bridge, chorus, outro. If that sounds like a rather long formula, that’s because it kind of is—of the 17 songs, only three fall below the four-minute mark, and none are shorter than 3:47.
There is likely a very good Noah Kahan album somewhere inside The Great Divide, but right now it’s obscured by its sheer volume. Taken individually, most of the songs are classic, solid Kahan fare; they might not surpass Stick Season, exactly, but they’re cut from the same cloth. But when you look at the record in full, it starts to feel as if it never really coalesces—or, perhaps, it coalesces too much. Rather than gaining something from placing these songs in conversation with one another, something feels lost instead. There can, sometimes, be too much of a good thing. [Mercury/Republic]
Casey Epstein-Gross is Associate Editor at Paste and is based in New York City. Follow her on X (@epsteingross) or email her at [email protected].
