(Mercury)
All but repeating the formula of his breakout album, Kahan seems torn between whether success is sustainable or even repeatable on songs defiantly rooted in small-town life
Last week, Netflix released a feature-length documentary about Noah Kahan called Out of Body. Over its 90 minutes, we learn that the 29-year-old Stick Season singer-songwriter is a worrier – about his weight, his career, his parents – and prefers his home state of Vermont to his new home in Nashville. He is self-deprecating, likable and perhaps not someone you can make a 90-minute documentary about at this stage of their career without recourse to padding.
That someone has tried says a lot about Kahan’s vertiginous rise over the last three years, a firm rebuttal to the idea that the privations of lockdown had changed the face of pop: that listeners were now after glitzy escapism rather than the dressed-down, earnest introspection of the post-Ed Sheeran troubadours this newspaper dubbed “the ordinary boys”. In fact, a new wave of dressed-down introspection was about to become a thing: Myles Smith is playing arenas, Alex Warren’s single Ordinary spent 13 weeks at No 1; Teddy Swims’ I’ve Tried Everything Except Therapy spent more than two years in the UK album chart. And the biggest thing of all is Kahan, who used to introduce himself on stage as “the Jewish Ed Sheeran”, has a thing for the stomp-clap rhythms of Mumford & Sons and stirs a little heartland rock – Springsteen via Sam Fender – into his sound. He was catapulted to success by Stick Season in 2022: a sweet, sad shiver of autumnal wistfulness written from the perspective of someone left behind in their home town when their friends and ex-girlfriend head off to university. It sold 10m copies, the first of eight huge hits from an album of the same name.
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