“A Balancing Act”: Noah Kahan Shares the Inspiration Behind His New Album, ‘The Great Divide’

After the best part of two years since he first teased it, Noah Kahan has finally released ‘The Great Divide’. The soul-searching anthem serves as the title-track to the folk titan's eagerly anticipated new album, which arrives on Friday, April 24th 2026.

In a new statement, the ‘She Calls Me Back’ hitmaker reflects on the creative process behind The Great Divide, and in doing so, Kahan sheds further light on the difficulties and adjustments he has faced throughout his wildly successful Stick Season era.

The Vermont native outlines, “The last five years have been the single most challenging, complicatedly beautiful, and life-altering of my career. I was somewhere I understood, and suddenly I was somewhere completely foreign. I was living in the opportunity I always wanted but felt disoriented and unsure of whether I deserved it”.

The ‘Forever’ singer-songwriter goes on to convey a sense of tension between nostalgia and optimism for the future, which lies at the heart of the project, “Writing for this album was a balancing act of trying to go back in time and move forward in the same moment. Songwriting has always been the way I reflect on my life, and I hope these songs show you a glimpse of what this journey has looked like”.

The title-track undoubtedly captures this “balancing act”, with Kahan examining a childhood friendship and lamenting how he acted when they were spending time together, before underlining his deep-seated desire for his old friend to overcome the struggles he was contending with. It's mournful, but unwaveringly hopeful.

In the original album announcement, the ‘Orange Juice’ crooner offered initial context to the creation of this body of work, “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. 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”.

He concludes, “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”.

Judging by Kahan's description, ‘The Great Divide’ is a beautiful encapsulation of what's to come on this project, and ensures the excitement remains sky-high ahead of April 24th.

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