Noah Kahan’s Album The Great Divide and our Favorite Musical Storytellers

Welcome to the Torg Stories Podcast. On this episode, Anne and I are going to talk about the new Noah Kahan album. It’s titled The Great Divide: The Last of the Bugs. 

Noah Kahan’s album The Great Divide: The Last of the Bugs was released during April of 2026.

Be sure to check out my favorite musical storytellers of all time at the bottom of the page.

Torg Family Updates: 

Mom: 

• tries to call Dad on her phone, asks when she’s going home. She forgets anything I tell her, and I’d have to tell her again. Sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t. 

Septic: 

• it was the seal of the toilet flapper. $5 repair and the yard is showing improvement already! However, about $350 to try and repair the yard with dirt and sod. 

The prom: 

• Our living room turned into Boone’s hottest restaurant serving 20 people Sat night. 

Noah Kahan’s album The Great Divide: The Last of the Bugs

A few details about Noah Kahan: 

1. 29 years old born in Strafford, Vermont. 
2. Strafford is half the size of Winamac, population around 1000
3. I watched his documentary on Netflix. It’s called Noah Kahan: Out of Body.  Click here to watch trailer. Quote from his mom: Noah makes our family’s dirty laundry just seem like being human. 
4. His dad won Ironman contests when Noah was a kid and suffered a traumatic brain injury in a bike crash. His parents got divorced. 
5. Two brothers and a sister who seem to figure largely into his songs. 
6. Kahan family professions: 

• Mom has written how parenting guides and taught English
• Dad worked in IT and played the guitar 
• Brother Richard is a firefighter. Documentary said the attention-deficit kids in their gym clothes is Richard. 
• Sasha is a pediatric surgeon in Park City 
• Simon works for a global consulting company based in New York 

7. Wife Brenna: engaged 2023, married 2025. Known each other at least since 2014. 
8. For April, 2026 article in Burlington Free Press, click here. 
9. This is his fourth album and it’s coming after Stick Season. There’s 21 songs on this one, an hour and 36 mins long. 

Favorite or Most Interesting Songs on Noah Kahan’s album The Great Divide: The Last of the Bugs

“The Great Divide” and click here for lyrics. 

Why this one? 

• Driving beat about the trauma of a friend who went through something back then. 
• Powerful images like fellow morons’ matching cigarette burns 

The title comes from “You inched yourself across the great divide.” 

Opening lyrics: 

I can’t recall the last time that we talked

About anything but looking out for cops

We got cigarette burns in the same side of our hands

We ain’t friends, we’re just morons

Who broke skin in the same spot

Who is the narrator thinking about all of the time? A friend, a romantic partner 

Important lyrics: 

I hope you’re scared of only ordinary shit

Like murderers and ghosts and cancer on your skin

And not your soul and what He might do with it

This capital He…

Whatever happened was bad enough that it would be nice to just worry about run of the mill murderers and skin cancer. 

“Haircut” and click here for lyrics.  

Opening lyrics: 

Storm took the phone lines down and now your ride can’t call

And you’re bouncing off the walls

I stretched my arms real wide, tried to break your fall

But you got up, mad as hell, and told me that I had it all

A lyric that suggests saying Kahan is the narrator might not be a stretch: Just to say that some small fame ain’t made me someone else

Haircut seems to be a metaphor for more: I’m happy for your haircut, I’m glad you got your act clеan

I think there are two singers in this song. The narrator and someone who plays bass and says the songwriter read their mind. 

It’s a lonely and defeated song. Last line: We were fine without you, baby.  

“American Cars” click here for lyrics 

Interesting bit from Genius.com: 

• “American Cars” is the third song from Noah Kahan’s fourth studio album, The Great Divide, and debuted on NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert on April 21, 2026.”

Opening lines: 

I was workin’ on a plan to disappear completely

Gaslightin’ my friends into thinkin’ I was busy

‘Cause if drinkin’ was a day job, I’d be askin’ for more money

Hell, I never take a day off, and I’m always sellin’ somethin’

One of my favorite sounding songs. It sounds optimistic. Good driving song. 

I like the narrator’s plan to disappear. 

“Gaslightin’ my friends” as psychological manipulation trying to make someone else doubt their perceptions. 

The rhyme of…American cars and you are 

• Didn’t know you drove American cars
• Ray-Bans on your face
• You’ve been driving all day
• But you’re here and we’re grateful you are

My observation that Harry Styles sings American Girls and Noah Kahan sings American cars. 

Feels like friends or siblings who need bailed out pulled through struggles. 

“Willing and Able” lyrics click here 

The chorus: 

I’m willing and able

If you wanna kick this rock around

If you’ve got a bone to pick with me

If you’ve got a flag, plant it in the ground

Oh, I’ll stay here ’til morning

Oh, we can fight like we used to fight

Bony-limbed, red-faced, and teary-eyed

Under the glow of the TV light

I’d be willing and able

So it’s “willing and able” to fight, pick a bone, stay up all night. 

It’s a somber song about fighting. Does the fighting seem healthy? Or like there’s a special bond in it?

What do you make of this lyric?

• And I’ll see you again in six months, when you need your next song.  

“Deny, Deny, Deny” click here for lyrics 

A more upbeat guitar rock and roll sounding song. 

The music launches when we get to this line, and the way this works is one of my favorite things about Kahan’s music: 

• I’ll get your house paid off so the feds can’t touch it

The title comes from, When I ask about the past, you deny, deny, deny. 

Doors click here for lyrics

There’s a thumping energetic beat to open and a line, “I’d hurt anyone who got too close and anyone who wouldn’t look. 

Significant lyric: 

I was born into a one-hundred-year storm

Foot of ice across Vermont

And in that dark, and in that frost, a heart was formed

Malcontented and unwarm

You were unsuspectin’, not unwarned

We get a metaphor of opening up doors here. 

Seems like a challenge or even an instruction from Noah to someone else: you don’t want to get involved with me. You have been warned. I am a losing streak waiting to happen. 

• I’m left staring at the ceiling listing reasons you should pack all your shit up. 

What do I make of it all? 

1. Kahan touts the mental health issues. I see that in characters who take or don’t take their medication. I see it in lots of songs about drinking too much. People in the songs have wounds. 

• Exhausted, guilty consciences 
• An unwillingness of some of the characters to open up, talk about the past
• The lyric, “I scream in my sleep.” 

2. Feels like a lot of people feel what Kahan describes in the songs and his music is a balm for their suffering. I like this album as much as anything I have heard for the first time but I like studying it and I like to have it on working in the yard. 
3. I heard Taylor Swift talk about this once: a song is just what I felt in that moment, and the song preserves that feeling. (Noah doesn’t have to feel this way all the time to put it in a song, and it’s something I think through and don’t put into the work because I’ve thought it through, and I think that can be a mistake). 
4. Kahan’s use of the word “you” and all the people that might address. 
5. Using you: Great Divide, Haircut, Willing and Able
6. He has this really emotionally tangled relationships with friends and family that I feel like I never had. 

The rest of the songs: 

1. End of August, the second part of the title comes from this one: Endin’ of August, the bugs are just starting to die. 

• It’s a matter of time until everything dies

2. Downfall: I hope it all goes terrible for you so you come back home. 
3. Lighthouse
4. Paid Time Off: feels like the good choice of the simple life in Sheffield working for paid time off, getting high, playing a round of golf on your day off
5. Staying Still: think I’m going to like this one when I spend more time with it. I can’t keep starting over… Are you good at staying still? 
6. Dashboard: it’s about running away from your problems (driving and the dashboard) only to find all the same problems, the person is still an asshole 

• Kind of a funny song that tells someone they are an asshole. 

7. 23: it’s about if he leaves someone at 23 then they will always be this good thing. If you leave someone then they can stay this perfect vision. 
8. Porch Light: title comes from he tells whoever the song addresses he’ll leave the porch light on. Lyric: I choke on the Poison spreading to my lungs. 
9. Headed North: wishing someone he knows was headed North, funny line about someone with a coexist sticker telling another to go to hell 
10. We Go Way Back 
11. Spoiled – so his children get spoiled 
12. All them Horses 
13. A Few of Your Own – I was high when I met you…
14. Orbiter – 
15. Dan – let’s talk about him. Where do we go when we die? He wouldn’t mind that spot where he’s camping. 

Favorite Musical Storytellers

1. Jim Croce: Bad, Bad Leroy Brown, Time in a Bottle, You Don’t Mess Around With Jim, Roller Derby Queen, Operator, Workin at the Car Wash Blues 
2. Everclear: Santa Monica, I Will Buy You a New Life, Everything to Everyone, Heroin Girl 
3. Liz Phair: Divorce Song, Polyester Bride  
4. Ben Folds: Brick, the couple’s trip to an abortion clinic, Annie Waits
5. Billy Joel: Piano Man, Scenes from an Italian Restaurant, Captain Jack, The Entertainer 
6. Paul Simon: Address about 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover, America, Kodachrome 

Thanks for checking out this episode of the Torg Stories Podcast!