‘Dashboard’ is one of the many stand-outs on Noah Kahan's stellar 2026 album, The Great Divide, with the Vermont native again stepping into the shoes of a close friend or relative as he self-critically assesses the person he has become in recent years.

It's a literary device Kahan utilises throughout The Great Divide, but on ‘Dashboard’ the ‘Northern Attitude’ hitmaker delivers a particulary damning self-assessement.

The track opens with a sparse, gentle acoustic guitar, with Kahan crooning ruefully over the undulating instrumentation. It's one of the more folk-leaning offerings on The Great Divide, with the sea-shanty chorus harking back to his beloved Stick Season era.

The gradual introduction of the electric guitar - which plays a key part throughout The Great Divide - helps to build the intensity as Kahan approaches the visceral, bitter chorus.

Much like ‘Downfall’ and ‘Porch Light’, ‘Dashboard’ seemingly finds Kahan examining the person he has become since enjoying an explosion in popularity off the back of Stick Season. He lambasts himself as an “asshole after all”, and heartbreakingly dismisses the work he's been doing and the fact that he got a new dog as insignificant.

It's clearly from the perspective of an envious friend who is spiteful about Kahan's success, with ‘Dashboard’ exploring themes of self-hatred as well as the uniquely complex challenges of maintaining friendships amidst such a meteoric rise to fame.

The imagery around driving and cars is pivotal to The Great Divide, with Kahan's line, “Just when you think that the road's straight ahead / Is when the devil shows up on your dashboard again” tying into the sense that the whole project is one long road-trip. Driving symbolises that feeling of being in-between places, identities and states, with the activity an inherently transitional mode of being. It's a beautifully evocative metaphor that captures the spirit of The Great Divide.

As part of his official The Great Divide album announcement, Kahan shed some illuminating light on what this body of work represents to him, “From a long silence forms a divide, a great expanse demanding attention. I stare across it. I see old friends, my father, my mother, my siblings, my younger self, the great state of Vermont. I want to scream these feelings, to gesticulate wildly at the figures on the other side, but my voice has grown hoarse and muted after years of climbing a ladder towards the wild, spiraling dreams that have materialized in front of me”.

The Vermont native offers insight into his creative process, “Instead, I wrote them down next to a piano in Nashville, next to a pond in Guilford Vermont, in a legendary studio in upstate New York, on a farm with a firetower in Only, Tennessee. The songs are the words I would say if I could. They are the fears I dance with in the moments before I drift off to sleep. The music here is my best attempt to delve deeper into the people, places, and feelings that have made me who I am. I am grateful for all of it, for all of you, for listening to them, if you choose to do so”.

Kahan has repeatedly touched on how challenging he found the writing process for The Great Divide, as the pressure to outdo his magnum opus, Stick Season, weighed on him, something he explored in-depth in his 2026 Netflix documentary, Out of Body. During an interview with Zach Sang, he reflected on how he managed to overcome his writers’ block, “It was a hugely cathartic experience. I had been so stressed and so lost and was literally thinking about quitting and going to work at my golf course as a divot repair person”, adding, “The Great Divide for me, I’m so proud of, because not only did it come out of a time of great pressure and expectation. I felt like I was fully able to say what I wanted to say in the songs”.

“You always went lookin' for an easy way out
Leave the pain you can't solve with the folks you let down
Like the world just restarts, like the clock just resets
Like we all just move on, like we all just forget

-

And you tell yourself lies and disguise them as facts
It’ll hurt half as much if you drive twice as fast
Just when you think that the road's straight ahead
Is when the devil shows up on your dashboard again

-

Look at you go, crossing state lines with your shadow
Tryna run away, change your zip code
Turns out that you're still an asshole

-

All your new friends look a lot likе your last
(I wonder why)
Took all those loose еnds, made 'em sandalwood beads 'round your neck
(Douche)

-

Just when you think that the road's straight ahead
When the devil shows up on your dashboard again

-

Look at you go, crossing state lines with your shadow
Tryna run away, change your zip code
Turns out that you're still an asshole
It ain't our fault that you aren't suddenly somebody else
'Cause you've worked on yourself, got a dog
You're an asshole after all

-

Yeah
Oh
Ooh
Hm

-

Look at you go, crossin' state lines with your shadow
Tryna run away, change your zip code
Turns out that you're just an asshole
It ain't our fault that you aren't suddenly somebody else
'Cause you've worked on yourself, got a dog

-

You're an asshole after all”

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Noah Kahan

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