“I describe this album as like I’m in the shower and I’m half yelling at the showerhead and pretending it’s whoever I want to talk to and taking responsibility or throwing blame, like those conversations that you wish you could have with people but have never been able to,” Noah Kahan tells Apple Music of his fourth album The Great Divide. Underneath Kahan’s trademark folksy veneer lies an urgent, high-stakes reckoning. Following the breakthrough success of 2022’s Stick Season, the Vermont-native singer-songwriter was left to assess the impact—not just on himself, but on those closest to him. “My life hasn’t just gone away and the impact of the music I made and the person I’ve become doesn’t just escape from these people just because they haven’t been living out on the road with me,” he says. With a few new collaborators in tow, including Aaron Dessner (“I felt very lost and I kind of just like trauma-dumped on him and he took it so well,” Kahan says) and pop whisperer Amy Allen (who’s written for the likes of Sabrina Carpenter and Olivia Rodrigo), Kahan weaves through the highs and lows of returning home again. Kahan also marks a big distinction between his last album and this one, mirroring his own growth. “Stick Season is like doing shrooms and thinking you understand the entire world, and The Great Divide is like three months later: ‘That was great and that was helpful, but there’s a lot more we gotta figure out still,’” he says. “He’ll do some shrooms with you, but he’s not going to pretend like it’s going to change his life. He’s not going to become a kayak guide somewhere. He has to go to work in the morning.” Below, Kahan takes us through four key tracks in his own words: “End of August” “I wanted to create a scene that just felt like late summer in Vermont or in a small town where there’s just that total quiet and you can almost hear music in the air. One thing that my family and I have in Vermont is, like, I walk through the woods and the woods are haunted, but not by mean spirits. We’ve all individually said, ‘Oh, I heard voices in the woods,’ and when I was writing that, I wanted it to feel like what those voices would sing if you were just like walking through the woods or driving past the woods in Vermont.” “23” “The song itself is not based on a story of my life, but based on a lot of friendships I have with people who have family members who are struggling with addiction or who have siblings who they can’t connect to. It’s that feeling of ‘I want you back, but I don’t want this version of you back’ and ‘I want that moment when we were sitting over the car hood and you were showing me how the engine worked and everything was normal.’ And so seeing who you are now betrays this version of you that I really want you to be in this memory I have of you. It’s a little selfish, because it’s like you’re asking someone to change for you, but it’s that kind of childlike innocent hope that someday we’ll just be exactly where we were.” “Porch Light” “I always worried that my mom felt or my family felt like I wasn’t myself anymore and that I was just some ghoul that would come in to extrapolate further success or further emotion for my own gain. The truth is my mom never felt that way. She always felt she always showed me love and showed me patience and understood the gravity of what I was going through. I wanted that hope to be in there, like, ‘I’ll leave the porch light on for you.’” “Dan” “There’s a few lines in the album that I feel like speak to that present feeling of, like, you’re already there. Like, heaven is a drink in the backyard. Like, where do we go when we die? I wouldn’t mind if it was right here. I wouldn’t mind if I was sitting by the fire with my buddy, or even lost in the woods, or even in a moment of, like, there’s something scary happening but you’re with this person and you’re experiencing this together in the same exact way.”