Source: Spotify
It’s funny how certain songs arrive exactly when you most need them, but don’t want to hear them yet. Noah Kahan’s much-anticipated album The Great Divide isn’t out until April 24th, but the recently released title track has already graced my Spotify like a friend offering logical advice and solutions when you just need someone to validate your emotions and listen to you complain. From the fifteen second snippet that had been doing the rounds on TikTok,
“I hope you settle down, I hope you marry rich.
I hope you’re scared of only ordinary shit”
I was picturing a tongue-in-cheek, slightly bitter tirade against a former partner who spurned you, wishing them a happy, but mundane existence that you never have to hear about - similar to ‘New Perspective’. Turns out this was 100% projecting, which may well have been the whole point. Instead, ‘The Great Divide’ deals with heavy hitting themes of religious trauma, misunderstanding and heartfelt apologies to someone you weren't there for in the way they needed.
The day it dropped, I was curled in a ball hungover, in a new flat, in a new city. I’d spent no less than seven hours FaceTiming my best friend, circling the drain of a story she’d heard a hundred times already while trying to keep my Microsoft Teams status on green. Sidebar - when someone warns you about the ‘first person after a long term relationship’, they are being 100% factual, and ‘The Great Divide’ felt like it had been written specifically to soundtrack this particularly diabolical life lesson.
I played it at least twenty four times that day: moping around my flat, crying, reluctantly getting ready to go out again, at the pre-drinks, walking home alone through rain soaked streets. I’d first heard Kahan perform it live last July, when it was still part of his much anticipated next project, "The Last of the Bugs". Over a year later, now fully fleshed out, it hit much harder on the second listen.
Whether it brings to mind an ex-partner, an old friend, an absent parent, a complicated relationship with God (or all of the above if you're an unlucky sod like me), ‘The Great Divide’ feels like an apology without an apology: the kind you’re only ready to receive when you’ve finally accepted that no one’s getting any closure.
To my musically untrained ear, it’s the emotionally mature, slightly less avoidant sister of ‘Orange Juice’- the Stick Season standout that goes triple platinum in my Spotify Wrapped every year. Both songs share Kahan’s signature nostalgic yearning for the people and places he can’t quite reach. However, ‘The Great Divide’ trades this earnest guilt and selfish blame for something more emotionally intelligent, opting instead to write from a place of growth and healing. Kahan has reached the important, but often painful awareness that sometimes love and understanding aren’t the same thing - nor are they always enough.
Instead of agonizing over why the subject of ‘The Great Divide’ has left his life, Kahan realises he misunderstood their inner struggle, acknowledging how hard it must have been for them to not have anyone to share it with at the time. The pre-chorus was the part of this song that struck me the most:
“You know I think about you all the time, and my deep misunderstanding of your life
And how bad it must have been for you back then, and how hard it was to keep it all inside”
It encapsulates a thought I keep coming back to lately: how differently two people can remember the same moment. How our memories of a person, or a situation, are warped by perception rather than fact. Kahan nails this sentiment through parallel imagery: he and the song’s subject both have “cigarette burns on the same side of [their] hands”. They’ve shared the same pain and bear the same scars, but they experience it differently. They hear the same songs playing in the car, yet he only hears the bass while she picks apart the lyrics. It’s devastating in its ordinariness; their experiences and pain mirror each other, and yet due to unspoken misunderstanding, their view of the other’s life is completely distorted.
And, of course, it wouldn’t be a Kahan track without an undercurrent of religious imagery. This time, the references are far less implicit than in ‘Paul Revere’ or ‘Orange Juice’. You don’t need to read the lyrics to hear that the “He” in
“And not your soul, and what He might do with it”
is capitalised- signalling the subject’s fraught relationship with faith. Like the girl from ‘Orange Juice’, whose implied recovery from alcohol addiction leads her towards religion, the subject here has turned to God as Kahan looks on with confusion and a hint of resentment. He hopes she has found a better way to deal with her pain:
“I hope you threw a brick right into that stained glass”
I could go on a tangent about Fleabag’s infamous bus stop scene here (“It’s God, isn’t it?”), but I’ll rein myself in.
Most of Kahan’s discography is rooted in a strong sense of Place. He ties the personal to the physical, using the literal distance between two states to mirror the emotional distance between two people.
“You inched yourself across the great divide,
while we drove aimlessly along the Twin State line”
The Twin State line refers to the border between Vermont and New Hampshire, anchoring the song firmly within Kahan’s New England roots.
In his own explanation of the song, Kahan admits that ‘The Great Divide’ also grapples with his guilt over moving on from his hometown. He struggles to reconnect with the past versions of himself that exist in rural Vermont, and in the minds of the people he once knew and loved there. He describes the ache of returning to a place he no longer belongs to, where versions of himself linger like old ghosts in other people’s memories.
In contrast, ‘The Great Divide’ is also a metaphor for the psychological distance building between himself and the subject, unbeknownst to him at the time. To me, that’s the essence of the song: ‘The Great Divide’ is the hometown best friend you grew apart from without quite knowing why or what changed. There was no heartbreak, no big argument, no clean break, just a slow drift apart until you return to being strangers.
Not every ending is a betrayal. That’s the lens I wanted to hear this song through - the quiet clarity that comes long after the conclusion of old friendships and reconnecting with old versions of ourselves. Unfortunately, you’ve caught me at a very male-centred time in my life, so it’s been hijacked by heartbreak instead.
I imagine that’s kind of the point of the song, though - the lyrics are able to morph into whatever interpretation you need, to fit the version of yourself you’re currently carrying. Wherever you are, Kahan has been too. Wherever you are going, Kahan will be there with you. Ultimately, that’s the power of his song-writing. His songs are able meet you wherever you are: on a hungover morning, at a crowded gig, or years later - finally ready to listen with acceptance.
