The Great Divide opens with a question Noah Kahan doesn’t answer for another 17 tracks. In ‘End of August’, two friends drive through a New England town whose future consists of having kids who grow up to build homes for the rich.
A piano opens softly, Aaron Dessner’s synths arrive slowly underneath, and over five minutes the track builds to something close to an epiphany. It’s the best thing Kahan has recorded. It also sets a bar the album, at 70 minutes, can’t consistently clear.
The terrain is familiar: Kahan left Vermont, became famous faster than he’d planned, and now feels guilty about both things simultaneously. What separates The Great Divide from Stick Season is that he’s willing to let other people say so.
‘Porch Light’ gives his mother’s perspective room to breathe, a family voice arriving in a song that had been his alone until it wasn’t. ‘Haircut’ records exactly what a resentful friend says when you come home changed: “We were fine without you, baby.”
‘Dan’, the closing track, sits two old friends beside a lake talking around what they can’t say to each other, and lands the album’s most precise and most devastating line: “Loon calls pierce through the violent sky / Think I stood right here back when Carlo died.” These are the moments where Kahan’s lyricism lands with the weight it’s reaching for.
Dessner’s production on those tracks is the real upgrade from Stick Season. He brings Mellotron, layered synths, Justin Vernon on banjo in ‘Downfall’, a wider sonic palette than Gabe Simon’s drier, fingerpicked approach. The two production styles sit alongside each other across the record’s 17 tracks, and the split is audible: the Dessner tracks tend to be the album’s peaks, the Simon tracks its dependable spine.
The problem is the length. At 70 minutes, The Great Divide runs past its own best arguments. The mid-album run of ‘Spoiled’, ‘Headed North’ and ‘We Go Way Back’ is emotionally sincere but sonically indistinct – the same fingerpicked guitar, the same patient build, the same chorus arriving on schedule. By the time ‘Dan’ closes the record it has the force of a statement the album has been working toward for an hour. A tighter version of this record, twelve tracks and an hour at most, would be among the best things Kahan has made. The version we have is still very good, and occasionally extraordinary.
I find it hard to be sceptical of an artist who documents body dysmorphia and OCD in a Netflix documentary and then backs it up with this degree of specificity in the songs. That’s not nothing. It might be the whole thing.
