Noah Kahan a mile from our front door. His biggest gig ever. An absolute slay, as my daughter might say.
And my daughter is who I need to thank. Yes, my mate Iain Archer co-wrote Still (credited or not and if you catch his small gig in Zurich soon then he’ll be singing this one with his daughter) so I had an early nudge but it wasn’t until my daughter took Kahan to her head and heart like I once did with The Beatles that I took notice. Dublin gig sold out. Another announced and again sold out. Who is this dude?
Amazingly, Jazzi is not with us in Boucher, preferring to see him in London! It might be the gig in 45 years of gig going that I knew so few of the artist’s songs before hand. The boy was under the spotlight. My daughter’s taste on the line.
First thing we noticed, as we thoroughly enjoyed support act Maisie Peters all short skirt, blonde hair, Noah sweatshirt with bags of charisma and tight songs, was that we were old! We noticed peers leaving off their children and in church the next morning “oh that must have been the gig our Eva was at last night.”
The crowd was huge and full of late teens and early twenties and predominately female which usually means boy or girl band. This could go very wrong.
The opposite. Forgive me young people for my judgement on your 21st century music tastes. This boy is an incredible writer and he and his excellent band can fill a few football fields.
Indeed, the young girls were a distinct advantage and added to the experience. Yes, a drink or two down and there was the usual high shrieks of drunken gibberish but when they sang it was like being enveloped in a huge heavenly choir.
Now, let me say, that these are not easy songs to sing. Kahan wraps his clever rhyming couplets in his own interpretation of verse and chorus. Yet, this crowd sang… and kept singing… every single word.
What I suddenly started to realise, helped by the clarity of the sound and Kahan’s voice was that we were in a night of catharsis. Kahan is all about mental health. Struggling with it himself he writes right into a young audience sadly struggling too.
Don't let this darkness fool you
All lights turned off can be turned on
I'll drive, I'll drive all night
I'll call your mom
Indeed when he left the stage I said to the girls in front, “well there is still one about Sticks for him to do,” and one of them said, “And I want The View Between Villages”. If I’d known the depth of loss in that song my pastoral vocation might have asked her if she want to talk about it!
Kahan is not just about the music. There is something profoundly helpful about these songs. I find his battles about where home is fascinating too. There are a lot of roads and driving on these songs, the grass greener somewhere else but then even greener back home in Vermont and there might be an interesting conclusion:
Drive slowly, I know every route in this county
And maybe that ain't such a bad thing
So, an absolute triumph for my daughter who predicted and for Kahan himself. He has Ed Sheeran’s boy next door demeanour in audience connection, funny and engaging. He works each end of that stage and his band fill the spaces. Shout out to his new fiddle player.
The songs? Well this morning I am marvelling at their authenticity, honesty, vulnerability as well as just how good they are. If that choir that enveloped me listen and listen good then there is cathartic help here in abundance to navigate the roads that my generation have built for them. On tonight’s acoustic outing, Growing Sideways, no mean feat in a crowd of 40,000:
I'm still angry at my parents
For what their parents did to them
Noah Kahan might go a long way to help them to forgive and get over us! As they say Stateside "colour me a fan!"