Image credit: a still from “The Great Divide” official music video

If you haven’t heard of Noah Kahan, chances are you weren’t at Calvin my senior year. From fall ‘22 to spring ‘23, it felt like everyone on campus and their cousin was listening to Kahan’s breakthrough album, Stick Season (2022).

Was I among them? No (I hate being mainstream). But several months after Stick Season’s release, my younger, cooler coworkers convinced me to give it a listen. I hit play on “Northern Attitude,” the opening track—and wham! Its grand chords, reckless beat, and defiant lyrics poured forth—a beacon in a fog of senior angst and seasonal depression. I was hooked.

Stick Season was a gift that kept on giving, and not only because Kahan re-released it with additional tracks in 2023 and 2024. Its emotional depth and range meant that different songs began to resonate with me at different times, as I moved through the seasons of my first few years postgrad. For me and many of my peers, it’s a formative work.

So, two weeks ago, when I saw that Kahan had released a new single—from his next album!—I was both excited and a little fearful. Would this new song, “The Great Divide,” uphold all that I knew and loved about Noah Kahan’s music? Or (like Chappell Roan’s “The Giver”) would it leave me disappointed and, frankly, confused?

As it turned out, “The Great Divide” delivers. It has everything that Stick Season fans could want: a sweet guitar riff; striking yet down-to-earth lyrics; and that depresso New England vibe of cars and long shadows, old intimacies and regret.

Kahan is no stranger to old friends. Many of his songs detail relationships warped and worn by time. Kahan’s friends grow emotionally distant (“All My Love,” “Maine”); they experience ideological shifts (“Orange Juice,” “New Perspective”); they tread the edge of death, or they die (“Call Your Mom,” “Carlo’s Song”). As Kahan himself has mentioned, the great divide is an image for relational separation—for the disconnects that can grow between friends and loved ones (or even within oneself) over time.

And yet, “The Great Divide” highlights another separation too: a spiritual one. The song’s title is reminiscent of C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce—a book that I, admittedly, haven’t read, but that explores the distinctions between Heaven and Hell—between the presence and the absence of God.

I’m not sure if Kahan intended this resemblance. But “The Great Divide” does indeed address a friend who, the narrator has realized, was wracked with religious anxiety. “I hope you’re scared of only ordinary shit,” Kahan sings in the chorus, “…and not your soul, and what He might do with it.” The song closes with the wish, “I hope you threw a brick right into that stained glass,” seemingly encouraging this friend to reject the religion that triggered so much internal chaos.

Real talk: as someone who grew up with a Christian mom, I felt uneasy hearing Kahan’s dismissal of religion. “That song glorifies disrespecting the church! And he’s saying that it’s cool to ignore God. What do you think about that?”

Mom, just so we’re clear, I don’t agree with Kahan wholesale. It’d be unwise to spend our whole lives focused on “ordinary shit.” After all, death is a reality that we ideally make our peace with.

But I think Christians can agree that Jesus didn’t die so we could lie awake at night, terrified that we’ll go to Hell if we aren’t “good enough.” (One could argue that our not being “good enough” is half the Bible’s point.) And when we encounter a friend tormented by these fears, it is indeed, as Kahan says, “shitty and unfair” to give them empty answers—or worse, to accuse them of having “weak faith”—instead of listening with compassion.

I was initially thinking that the answer to Kahan’s great divides is to reach across them to our friends: to erase these spaces of change and difference, so that it’s like they no longer exist.

But maybe another answer is to walk with our friends across the great divides of their lives. To witness each other’s phases, growth, and mistakes—and to trust that grace waits across every divide, if we can only see it.

Eleanor Lee

Eleanor Lee (‘23) graduated from Calvin with degrees in computer science and writing. She grew up in South Carolina but currently lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She loves coffee, laughing, and bringing emojis to the workplace.