Concert review
Sorrow has been the prevailing emotion inside T-Mobile Park this summer. While the Mariners were on the road this weekend getting swept by the fallen-from-grace Blue Jays, folk-pop megastar Noah Kahan kept the sad vibes going, moving into the ballpark to close one of the summer’s biggest stadium tours with two sold-out nights in Seattle.
The small-town troubadour has gotten improbably massive with an arsenal of mellifluous, bedroom-crafted songs dealing with mental health, strained relationships and life in rural Vermont. Not exactly the feel-good Top 40 hits that fill summertime stadium tours — a fact least of all not lost on the man himself.
After opening Night 1 on Sunday with glistening heartland rocker “American Cars,” which purred like a fixed-up Chevy, and a hard-chugging “Doors,” Kahan took a breath to survey the stadium crowd and give a quick introduction. “Seattle, holy (expletive). My name is Noah Kahan and I’m here to make you miserable,” the larger-than-life folkie, who writes serious songs without taking himself too seriously, joked of his favored subject matter.
Although the singer-songwriter can pen sad songs with the best of them, the Noah Kahan experience is anything but mopey. It helps that the self-deprecating star is genuinely funny, lightening the mood between emotionally heavy tunes with a dude-next-door charisma and a small-town humility that’s made him one of the most rootable figures in music.
“Does anybody here have OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder)?” Kahan asked between the bright-side boot stomper “All My Love” and meatier folk rocker “Deny Deny Deny.” “Congrats. My therapist tells me it’s important to share my thoughts with people even if they sound crazy. So, when I look at a crowd like this, all I can think about is how if you guys all collaborated together and you didn’t like a song, you could probably rip me limb from limb and tear my skin off and wear it. Real quick, Seattle are you going to tear my skin off and wear it? No! … OK cool, let’s have a great show.”
Kahan has his share of quieter acoustic numbers that dwell in internal wounds or ugly emotions — like a heart-wrecked “Downfall” that cut to the bone after a bluegrassy “Haircut,” both off this year’s “The Great Divide.” Later on, emotional dagger “Orbiter” didn’t so much stab as it did slice with surgical precision, despite its less relatable post-stardom origins of being “bitter, drunk on a red carpet” after taking an awards show loss.
But unquestionably his biggest strength is turning even the teariest songs into full-blown anthems — sweet-singing eruptions that have grown in tandem with the size of his crowd. It can often be cliché to talk about music as catharsis, though the way Kahan and his fans have flipped the deepest, darkest internal conflicts into communal elation so organically is truly special.
With heartstring-tickling guitars and rolling-valley crescendos, a pairing of “Northern Attitude” and “The Great Divide” made for the most uproarious singalongs of the night. At least until a closing “Stick Season,” the rollicking title track from his breakthrough album and his signature hit approaching 2 billion streams on Spotify alone. Kahan’s 2½-hour set was culled almost entirely from “Stick Season” and “The Great Divide,” his two most recent life-changing albums.
“I was ready to play the Showbox the rest of my career,” the kid from maple syrup country admitted after “Porch Light,” one of a few numbers where Kahan’s sticky melodies got a little too sweet.
Kahan might not be the prototypical stadium-filling pop star, but as he’s stepped in ballparks, he has supersized his tour’s production about as tastefully as one can. At the heart of the true-to-his-roots set design was a well-worn roof replicating the New England house on the cover of “Stick Season.” (At one point, Kahan climbed the roof for a solo-acoustic “Willing and Able.”) An old station-wagony cop car sat off to the side, used to stage a slightly hokey fake arrest during fan favorite “Dial Drunk.”
In a sign of Kahan’s growing celebrity, the singer-songwriter fielded a prerecorded video call from Seahawks stars Sam Darnold and Cooper Kupp before opener Gigi Perez joined Kahan for “She Calls Me Back.” The defending champs, who defeated Kahan’s New England Patriots in the Super Bowl less than eight months ago, seized the opportunity to remind the Seattle crowd of Kahan’s NFL loyalties.
“Well, now I am worried that you guys are going to eat my skin,” Kahan joked.
Another reason the king of salt-of-the-earth anthems has resonated is his ability to write so acutely about life in small-town America. Listening to Kahan’s records is like walking into a townie bar at Christmastime, a cozy world of intimately familiar yet slightly estranged characters with lots of unresolved feelings. These sentiments hit hardest during Sunday’s encore when Kahan and his six-piece band were joined by a trio of local horn players, including trombonist Greg Kramer of the True Loves.
After a resplendent “End of August,” Kahan closed the evening by tearing through “Homesick” and “Stick Season,” a pair of songs exploring the quintessential tug-of-war between loving your hometown and wanting to run from its ghosts. However unlikely a superstar Kahan may seem, his distinctly American songs felt right at home in a packed baseball stadium on a late-summer night.
Kahan and tens of thousands of fans will do it again Monday when the folk rocker completes the North American leg of the tour at T-Mobile Park.
Noah Kahan Night 1 Set list
- “American Cars”
- “Doors”
- “All My Love”
- “Deny Deny Deny”
- “Staying Still”
- “Haircut”
- “Downfall”
- “She Calls Me Back” with Gigi Perez
- “Dashboard”
- “Dial Drunk”
- “Willing and Able”
- “Porch Light”
- “Orbiter”
- “We Go Way Back”
- “Paid Time Off”
- “Pain is Cold Water”
- “Maine”
- “Dan”
- “The View Between Villages”
- “Northern Attitude”
- “The Great Divide”
- “Orange Juice”
- “New Perspective”
- “End of August”
- “Homesick”
- “Stick Season”
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