Noah Kahan Makes Merry With ‘Miserable’ Songs in Triumphant Rose Bowl Gig

“My name is Noah Kahan and I am here to make you fucking miserable!” the biggest male rock star on the charts right now announced almost at the outset of his sold-out show Saturday night at Pasadena’s Rose Bowl Stadium. In this, he was unsuccessful, but to Kahan’s credit, he did not really try very hard to turn the 57,000-strong crowd into a miserablists’ convention. There was some truth ungirding Kahan’s introductory joke, given how much of the song catalog that has made him a superstar is devoted to what he would call “intrusive thoughts” about disconnection, loneliness and unworthiness. But the celebrative spirit of the two-and-a-half-hour show kept all of those undercurrents at bay, to maybe be better experienced when you’re back home, just the records and you and your neurodivergence. In concert, Kahan’s about nothing but putting on a pure jubilee — as good a time as you’re likely to have in any concert venue, large or small, in 2026.

L.A. locals will remember that he was easily selling out two nights at the Hollywood Bowl in mid-2024, so his instantaneous sellout of the Rose Bowl isn’t that much further of a leap. (He probably could have sold out two here, too, if the tour planners had left room for multi-nighters in his schedule.) But this wave of Kahan-mania hasn’t been going on for so long that we can’t still be impressed and maybe even puzzled by the sheer unlikeliness of it. Humble singer-songwriter comes along singing about bare trees, cold morning drives, dead friends, divorced parents and all the uncertainties anyone in his twenties in the most forlorn parts of the Northeast could face, and suddenly he’s as big as BTS? Go figure. You get the sense from Kahan that he hasn’t completely figured out himself what went so right in singing so much feel-wrong music: “I remember playing at the Troubadour and being happy if that was the rest of my career,” he told the massive crowd. “I’m grateful as fuck to be here with y’all.” That’s a common sentiment from a touring superstar, but there’s a sense that Kahan really might be as happily bewildered as the rest of us about how songs this personal and cloudy came to captivate even sunny California.  

Anyway, he’s good — really, really, really good – so that’s a gift horse we won’t look in the mouth. As far as pop stars who happen to also be thoughtful and excellent songwriters go, Kahan is in the upper ranks. If anything, he’s underrated, at least by some of the cognoscenti, who tend not to know how to think about it when something that falls loosely under the rubrick of Americana makes it big, other than to mark it down as some sort of curious throwback to Mumford & Sons’ stomp-and-holler folk-rock mini-revolution. It is partially that, but Kahan is also really a contemporary to Taylor Swift, in the way that he fills his songs with peculiarly personal details that leave fans hanging on every lyric, on the way to doing satisfying stadium romps where the faithful will shout back every long-memorized random aside. (Not right in your ear, if you’re lucky.) He’d probably get more credit for just how strong the writing is if he’d stayed in a proper niche, but some overnight sensations can’t be helped.

His most recent album, “The Great Divide,” is one of the year’s most commercially sturdy records, not having been out of the top 10 since it debuted in April and not likely to leave any time soon. The 20-track (in its deluxe version) set might be even stronger in its storytelling than the star-making “Stick Season,” so it was not to the Rose Bowl set’s detriment at all that he performed 14 of its tracks. One of those songs, “Orbiter,” is about his experience at the 2024 Grammys, feeling like a loser when he lost the best new artist category to Victoria Monet. (Remarkably, that’s one of just two Grammy categories Kahan has even been up for, the other being as a featured artist on someone else’s country song. ) Being back in the greater L.A. area for this show, he used the Rose Bowl as his confessional.

“This is not gonna endear me to the crowd,” Kahan said, gearing up to explain why this is not his favorite city. “L.A. has been home to some of the worst days of my life and my music career. I’m sorry, it’s not your guys’ fault, but I’ve always felt a little out of place here… I always felt like when I came here I was auditioning for something, even though I wasn’t. I never felt like I fit… I got my feelings so hurt by losing awards and losing things and feeling like I was entitled to shit that I wasn’t entitled to. None of us are entitled to anything in this business, or in our lives, really. Um, and I thought about why I wanted to keep going, and it was for my wife, my mom, and it was for you all. So this is a song about you three — my three best friends.”

In the fairy-tale version of this story, his team would submit his song about losing a Grammy, and it would win a Grammy. That won’t happen, not least of all because there are more obvious focus tracks than “Orbiter” to put in for possible nominations. Even then, who knows if Recording Academy voters will be yet ready to give him his due? If “The Great Divide” doesn’t get much Grammy love, it might only help further drive his art. Kahan seems to thrive, on this latest album, on exploring some of the vagaries that come with getting a lot of attention, and how it affects relationships with family and old friends and even (maybe) especially his own self-image. And it’s pretty interesting stuff. There have been a number of albums this year that go into the side effects of fame — Ariana Grande’s in a big way, Phoebe Bridgers’ to a lesser extent — but no one is quite so humble or conflicted about it as Kahan. He projects himself onto old acquaintances or family members, laying into him in ways it’s unlikely very many of them have in real life. One song that was a big hit Saturday night, “Dashboard,” is a song in which, effectively, he inhabits the role of someone who is calling Noah Kahan an asshole for four minutes. It’s endearing and very catchy, even if perhaps the asshole in question doth protest too much.

In reality, Kahan’s ascent strikes people as a case of good guys finishing first… as they always do, right? I was struck by how Chappell Roan characterized him when he brought her out to duet at the Rose Bowl. Her surprise appearance late in the set was so that they could trade verses and harmonize on the choruses of her song “California,” a ballad that shares some themes of dislocation and dissociation that are common to Kahan’s own geographically specific songs. As recognition of her red tresses turned into a roar, Kahan sang Roan’s praises, describing “California” as “the first song I ever heard of Kayleigh’s, and the reason I fell in love with her music. And I’m just really proud of her.”

Roan returned the appreciation, saying, “Noah always stands up for me, seriously.” (Fans likely understood this to reference how, in March, Kahan publicly had her back when Roan was taking some flack for protesting the aggressiveness of professional autograph scalpers.) Roan doubled down on Kahan’s virtue: “He’s a good person — for real.” Now, “good person” may not be as reliable a way to trump up a rock star as something, like, say, “bad-ass,” but we have the feeling his career will survive the rumors of his virtue.

A few things have changed since Kahan headlined the Bowl two years ago, besides the major infusion of “Great Divide” songs. For one thing, there were fewer extended comic monologues, which I missed, though I wouldn’t argue that any of the 27 songs in the set should be tossed out for the sake of a funny story. Kahan may be figuring that he gets to exercise that muscle enough on social media, or that his fans have already heard plenty abut his family dynamics, whether in past tour patter or in his excellent recent Netflix documentary, “Noah Kahan: Out of Body,” which went in a lot deeper than a moment’s anecdote could. Anyway, he was witty enough, and telling enough, in passing. In “All My Love,” a new song where he catches an old friend or lover up on recent developments in his life, he sings of his amicably divorced parents, “My folks still talk, but they speak in these two-word sentences.” In concert, he found time before the next line to quickly add: “And now they’re up to seven-word sentences!”

Kahan’s voice is one of the things about him that may be underrated. He sounds like he’s constantly on the verge of breaking into a falsetto, but not quite needing to go there, although if he does, it’s as sweet and expressive as you’d hope. As with a lot of singers we take for granted, you don’t really think about how strong he is until something goes amiss. There was just such a moment in Saturday’s show, when he went to sing “Pain Is Cold Water” — a touching acoustic song that he only does occasionally, acoustically, on the C-stage — and his voice cracked in the very first line. “Oh my God!” he blurted, stopping it and starting again to give it a fighting chance. It proceeded flawlessly from there, with Kahan almost apologizing for how slick it turned out. “Sorry to go all Christina Aguilera on you after sounding like a 13-year-old boy,” he joked.

The biggest difference from his “Stick Season” touring, anyhow, is — surprise — production values. This tour has a nifty conceit: a physical rooftop that cyclically fell and rose to provide the roofline for different structures that changed as a result of digital projections combined with pillars and/or porches that stagehands would bring out. At first it was a cabin he and his six-piece band would perform in front of, with an old beater of a Volvo parked outside. Later on, the cabin became a general store, and the car turned into a Vermont police cruiser — just in time, inevitably, for one of his signature songs, “Dial Drunk.” This presumably fictional tale of a DUI arrest was dramatized (or comedicized) with a trooper actually slamming Kahan against the hood, followed by cameras catching just the right angle on him inside the vehicle as he lamented the girlfriend who would not pick up. Aside from a few agreeable band poses, “Dial Drunk” was the only time of the night there was anything that might be considered schtick… and in a stadium setting, it’s hard to begrudge that crowd-pleasing of a moment.

By contrast, when the braided star went up onto the hovering rooftop to sing a single number atop the prop with his acoustic guitar, “Willing and Able,” he seemed to be having a genuinely emotional moment, which much of the quieted crowd definitely observed. If he was just acting his way through that number, no harm done. Either way, it says a lot that Kahan would take one of the quietest numbers from the sprawling “Great Divide” and make a somber, solitary place for it in his big rock show, trusting that the subtle storytelling about two old friends uneasily dancing around their resentments and suspicions will be intutively understood or embraced by a crowd of tens of thousands. Violin player Nina de Vitry provided an especially tasteful complement on this ballad, making one fiddle sound like a whole string section.

Kahan also made sure to give solo spots to the rest of his accomplished ensemble — Zubin Thakkar, Dylan Jones, Alex Bachari, Marcos Valles and Mike Harris. The six-piece backing crew turned into a nine-piece when they were joined for the three encore numbers by a three-person horn section, allowing the music to take on a Springsteenian/”Wrecking Ball” quality for the extended finale.

The way Kahan was able to choreograph this fiddle- and banjo-laden group across different parts of the stage to visually elongate the party was reminiscent of what another player in the superstar-Americana space, Zach Bryan, has done with the players at his stadium shows. But any thinking about similarities along those lines inevitably leads to thinking about how fundamentally different Bryan’s and Kahan’s personalities are. Bryan is sympathetic but still surly… or at least his offstage shenanigans lead you to feel he could pop off without a lot of provocation. Kahan, on the other hand, is absolutely your BFF… and the worst thing he is going to do is ghost you, and then come back to town and apologize for ghosting you, and then write a song about how he knows you resent him for patronizing you, because he’s empathetic that way. Very important distinction there.

Kahan is one of the good guys not least of all because of the honest ways in which he talks about substance abuse recovery and mental health, with songs that do such a bravura job of exploring what it is like to, as he says, have a busy head. We probably shouldn’t judge artists by the signs that fans bring to their performances, but I had to take some amusement when the cameras at the Rose Bowl began showing glimpses of the fans down front during some of the final songs of Saturday’s show. Instead of asking for a request or a hug or a birthday shout-out, the camera caught a young woman holding up a big, wordy sign that read, in part: “Thank you for breaking the chain of generational trauma!”

A different kind of artist calls for a different kind of fandom… a therapeutized one that knows manic elation when they see it.