There's screaming at concerts, and then there's the noise the young crowd made at Noah Kahan's show at the Hollywood Bowl on Thursday night.
There, Kahan, a 27-year-old Vermont folk singer who captured TikTok's Gen Z romantics, had nearly all of his plaintive lyrics howled. It was a visceral catharsis, of the caliber of “Eras,” even in the quiet parts (maybe especially in the quiet parts). No Vermonter has been greeted with such arena-rock delirium since Bernie Sanders.
Listening to Kahan's 2022 LP, “Stick Season,” which earned him a Grammy nomination for best new artist, you might not expect that kind of reaction. It's an intimate, wire-woven record filled with finger-picking and lyrical details specific to his life and his autumnal hometown. His scene at the Bowl included a recreation of his childhood living room.
But every few years, pop has its Dashboard Confessional moment on MTV Unplugged: a new singer-songwriter who transcends whatever else is happening on the charts and sticks something in the ready hearts of young people. This is Kahan's season for such a feat.
Kahan, a bearded, disarmingly sincere songwriter with a very cute dog on his album art and a mental health charity called the Busyhead Project, signed to Republic in 2017. He released a couple of LPs that didn't connect with a mass audience. But he did something smart with the single “Stick Season,” teasing early drafts on TikTok in late 2020 that reflected a back-to-campus melancholy in a tense time (“I'm terrified of the weather 'cause See you when it rains / The doctor told me to travel, but there is COVID on planes.
Upon release in 2022, the single peaked at No. 9 on the Billboard Hot 100 and the album peaked at No. 2 on the Hot 200, with a much larger edition released in February as it gained momentum. Kahan was a smart collaborator, making guest appearances or co-writing with Post Malone, Zach Bryan, Lainey Wilson, Kacey Musgraves, Brandi Carlile and Hozier. Olivia Rodrigo covered it. If her algorithm ever detected an interest in fingering for love, she found her way to Noah Kahan.
Noah Kahan was brutally candid in his music, but modest about his status as a new pop star, during his performance at the Hollywood Bowl on Thursday.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
He is mocked for supposedly reviving the “stomp-clap” strain of indie folk popularized by Mumford & Sons in the 2010s. That comparison is unfair, however, given the spread of country music to every other genre in the world. present. On Thursday at the Bowl, tens of thousands of very young fans found their own Internet-age American culture.
From the first track, “Dial Drunk,” a big drunk tank ballad for a generation giving up alcohol, Kahan created a Springsteen-caliber story for himself and his hometown.
With Willie Nelson braids and his endearingly bleak jokes (“Are there any divorced kids here? Let me hear you say, 'Daddy's house is empty and weird.'”), Kahan was brutally sincere in his music but modest about his status. like a new pop star.
He could play a song like “Forever,” where he longs for “the edges of your soul that I haven't seen yet,” and immediately afterward joke that, “I feel like a manipulative youth pastor. Like 'Jesus has rizz.'”
The specific details of Kahan's aesthetic (trees stripped of vegetation, childhood homes riddled with trauma, alcohol soaked in a freezing winter) are the real hook for devotees. A New England schoolbook became a kind of cowboy symbol in “Paul Revere,” and in “Come Over,” he read closely the place that made it so: “my house was designed to look like I was crying / When They mention the sad boy in a sad house on Balch Street / You won't have to guess who they're talking about.”
Behind all that, he's a talented musician: Kahan uncorked a nice falsetto on “You're Gonna Go Far” and got really heavy on a heartbreaking “The Great Divide.” He convincingly addressed more adult concerns on “Orange Juice,” where the shame of new sobriety took on deep weight in the details: “There's orange juice in the kitchen, bought for the kids / It's yours if you want it, we're happy you could visit.”
Kahan is old enough to want a place in the songwriters' canon, but he's still a little tied to the college melodrama that made him famous.
There's no time limit on being “mad at my parents for what their parents did to them,” as he sang on “Growing Sideways,” but there was something too clever about grabbing a lone microphone in the middle of the audience to sing about how he “ took my medication and I spilled my trauma / on the expensive new leather couch of a middle-aged man with sad eyes.” Every member of that well-therapist crowd has probably had that conversation, and Kahan knew how to hit them where they lived.
For now, Kahan is treading an intriguing path between country music's resurgence, TikTok hit-making acumen, and ultra-intense fan culture. Thursday's show demonstrated why it happened to him: He's expert and self-aware at his craft, splitting the difference between Taylor Swift's world-building and Conor Oberst's majestic miserablism. Is he for all ages? Maybe one day. But Noah Kahan as a real pop star today? It's worth stomping and applauding.
