Noah Kahan follows Coldplay and Olivia Rodrigo into the Hunger Games…
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Julian Axelrod: It feels like there’s thematic overlap between Noah Kahan and The Hunger Games — noble sacrifice, strained friendships, conflicted feelings about your hometown — but both aesthetics are too murky for me to make sense of the connection. I like that the streaming release credits the singer and franchise together like Suzanne Collins was in the booth laying down fiddle, but compared to something like the Twilight soundtracks, this song really underlines that the main musical motif of this 15-year series is… acoustic bluegrass ballads about child death?
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Nortey Dowuona: A very tender and lovely song for a relationship that if I wasn’t a limpid dork, I would still be stewing about. Ah, to be alone and broke. And by that I obviously mean this song. What, you thought I was referring to Noah Kahan?
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David Allun Jones: Confession #1: I’ve yet to see or read anything The Hunger Games. It’s one of a trillion things on my must-consume bucket list, but as of this moment, all I know about it is that there are people with Final Fantasy hair fighting in a dystopian setting (…and falling in love with each other, maybe?). Confession #2: I have never purposefully listened to Noah Kahan except as accidental background noise, all I know about him is long hair, guitars and folksy vibes (…that people fall in love with each other to, maybe?). I could predict however, before I heard a single note, that this would be all shades of rustic with Feelings and Deep Meaning maximized to widescreen levels befitting any other Oscar-targeting soundtrack contribution. “Draw You Out” is precisely that and not much more, filled with lots of words and strums and forlorn sentiment that would no doubt sparkle in moments involving a loved one’s death, a fresh breakup or looking out the passenger side window on a rainy day (especially if any of these things also involved a woodsy setting). I do like the Paul Simon lilt Kahan takes on in moments though, which mostly serves to remind me to cue up some “You Can Call Me Al”. Thanks for that Noah. As for this song? Emoji shrug.
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Jel Bugle: A charitable 5, it’s just a bit boring, I guess some people might get something from the words? It’s like boyband music but just a bit dreary, the Backstreet Boys would turn this into a proper song.
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Alfred Soto: He needs to take a pill in Ibiza.
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Hannah Jocelyn: First of all, “The Great Divide” is at least an [8], I was wrong – in fact, I’ve come back to the titular album more than albums I initially gave higher scores, especially as my non-snobby music friends worship Kahan. (He does, in fact, look a thing like Jesus, and he talks like a gentleman, like you’d imagine when you hear his songs.) “Draw You Out” is an uncharacteristically busy Dessner production, and it’s good to hear him back in this mode, recalling the immersive detail of his best pre-Folklore productions. That sometimes snuck onto Great Divide, particularly on bonus track “Orbiter” and opener “End of August”, but it feels like there’s more money to go around. Maybe I’m overrating this, but I like the almost M83 processing on Kahan’s voice, and the lyrics here — the clunkiness of “I’ve been feeling like a wing-clipped bird” aside — show he can translate his self-effacing style into people that aren’t himself. Matt Berninger certainly couldn’t.
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James M Errington: I’m getting tired of complaining about guys doing the sad wickle puppy voice, might move on to complaining about guys doing the depressed Sting voice.
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Callie Petch: Whilst very much an effort by Lionsgate to make the Twilight multimedia phenomenon strike twice, I have a soft spot for the three tie-in soundtrack albums made for The Hunger Games‘ original run. Almost nobody put in their best work on them (shout-out to Chvrches as the exception), but they worked as strange snapshots of indie-adjacent pop (and pop-adjacent folk) of the 2010s, plus the time they just let Lorde collate a mixtape of her favourite acts was really cool. After skipping Mockingjay Part 2 and half-assing The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, the studio, perhaps emboldened by artistic and commercial successes like the I Saw the TV Glow and Twisters tie-in albums, have decided to go all-in again for the upcoming Sunrise on the Reaping. Stacking the tie-in album with all manner of big names (Ella Langley, Kacey Musgraves, Tyler Childers), bloating out to 29 songs over 100 minutes, and pairing up Noah Kahan with that blight on modern pop music Aaron Dessner to try and envision the world in which Bon Iver post-For Emma decided to go all Vance Joy for the likely-incongruous end credits song. I mean… it’s fine? Like most of Kahan’s stuff, I just feel like I’m hearing upcycled versions of a stomp-clap-hey genre I quickly grew tired of the first time round. It’s blandly inoffensive and commercially rustic, designed to frictionlessly shuffle you out of the theatre rather than sit there intaking the names of the people who made the 150 minute movie you hopefully enjoyed. I will say though, having yet to see the film, this does seem too uplifting to be a part of The Hunger Games soundtrack. Did it get lost on the way to the soundtrack for that crowdfunded 2014 Zach Braff film we all memory-holed?
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