Noah Kahan – The Great Divide

I hope you settle down, I hope you get a [6]…

[Video]
[4.83]Tim de Reuse: Too precious, too long, too treacle-sweet; and yet the central conceit of the song (What if you had an old friend who was reckless and you think about them all the time?) is too interesting for him to not stumble onto a few really piercing lyrics, John Darnielle-ian in their specificity. Just a shame that for every effective invocation of “being scared of ordinary shit” he also throws in tortured sideways metaphors like “I heard nothing but the bass in every ballad that you’d play.” Guess you gotta give the fans on genius.com something to do with their weekends.
[5]

Alfred Soto: One of the fellas I talk to at my favorite bar recommended it because it was meaningful. He was right! Because it has guitars, a Rolling Stone hack might claim Rock is Back. Noah Kahan’s defiant-wimp voice isn’t to my taste no matter the empathy of his shows of feeling. Is he flexing an ironic muscle when he hopes his troubled friend doesn’t worry about the condition of his eternal soul? Thanks to my distrust of Kahan’s vocal, I don’t bet on him having his buddy’s back when he does throw that brick through a window.
[6]

Claire Davidson: “The Great Divide” is fundamentally a song about relinquishing control. Over the song’s five-minute runtime, Noah Kahan narrates the story of how he grew to realize that he treated an old flame poorly, tampering her wild energy with his own callousness and lack of investment in her dreams. Yet rather than express resentment or make a bid for getting her back, the song’s extended scope sees Kahan make peace with the reality that he’s likely lost her trust for good, ultimately opting to wish her well in whatever endeavor she chooses. That’s a mature sentiment, and one I really respect coming from Kahan, but the song’s expression of that goodwill feels a bit safe, attempting to strike a sheepish balance between the verses’ more elegiac nature and the full-throated abandon of the chorus. The most egregious offender here is the song’s guitar arrangement, which gestures at propulsion without ever truly capturing the surge of energy Kahan’s narrator feels when letting go off his projections; it needed to have been a few degrees faster to fully harness that epiphany. Kahan, too, struggles to really let himself loose, relying on a nasal upper register that makes him sound cloistered on the hook, even while seemingly laying his heart on the line. Perhaps the greatest divide that stifles this song is that which plagues every artist: the gulf between one’s creative ambitions and their actual ability to realize them.
[6]

Hannah Jocelyn: Seventeen Castles Going Under The Hill? a Piano Man playing on the Borders with Red Eyes?  I wish this hit harder for me, especially with a chorus that well-written, but it makes me want to listen to everyone he’s borrowing from. I can’t even get excited at the way the band comes in on the offbeat anymore.
[5]

Andrew Karpan: The failure of every of Noah Kahan song is kind of like the failure inherent in everything else about this country. The petty, self-satisfied resentment. The smug, clever knowingness.  The stinging bitterness of the harsh wind. Perhaps Mr. Kahan is truly a poet about these things, perhaps boring people should be listened to, sagely. It’s a great country, but what big, ugly portions too; If Drake wasn’t a Canadian and was, instead, speaking to us in our language, what would he say? This I guess.
[1]

Nortey Dowuona: The great divide is between those who are losing faith in the human and those who demand fealty to a specific human. That fight will continue the longer we exist and the further strides we make as a species while depleting the earth until it kills us all. It’s not impossible to slow, or even adjust to this very real moment in human history, but we are still singing to our grandchildren with limp, flimsy pleas of forgiveness as we watch them twist in the burning rays of the sun, drugged up so much their bodies quit before they burst aflame. We lose faith in the human since we watch the human destroy from birth and destroy through the fallacies we tally but cannot halt, We demand fealty to certain people who either comfortably grasp at power or in their fright, seize it so tightly it snaps the neck in midair. The divide only grows the more of us stick our heads in the sand, hoping our deserved extinction will be quick and painless, while those who look clearly at what is coming are burning deep in their soul, watching the planet reject and deplete us, preparing for its replenishing once our survival becomes impossible. But even in small pieces of art, you can find the courage to remove your head from the sand and look clearly upon the future, helping to prepare and deal with the growing challenges that are coming. I don’t know what my soul will be doing once I return to the energy that makes up the universe, though. I hope Lillith and Bondye make a new planet of it. Hopefully there aren’t as many wars.
[6]