To know Noah Kahan is to really really love him. Or so it seemed Friday night at the “Stick Season” singer’s first of two physically and emotionally packed Xcel Energy Center concerts. “Who is Noah Kahan?” you might ask — especially if you’re over the age of 30 or into music with any kind of edge or subtlety. He’s a TikTok-launched, ultra-earnest acoustic folk-rock singer from the woods of Vermont who’s become pop music’s fastest-rising singer/songwriter since Billie Eilish. He has recruited Post Malone, Kacey Musgraves, Brandi Carlile and Hozier to sing on his songs. On his own, he kind of sounds like a cross between Mumford & Sons and Ed Sheeran. Kahan, 27, was barely big enough to fill Minneapolis’ 1,500-capacity rock hub First Avenue when he hit the Twin Cities two years ago. Now he’s playing to around 15,000 people two nights in a row at St. Paul’s hockey arena. The size of the crowd wasn’t even as impressive as the volume and voracity of it. Predominately made up of high school girls and college-age women — with a smattering of older fans of the Counting-Crows-casino-gig variety, too — the audience not surprisingly sang along loudly to the opening song, “Dial Drunk.” That’s one of Kahan’s biggest hits (the one Malone sings on), and it certainly made for a fun show-opener. Way more surprising was the fact that the audience never really stopped singing for the next 1¾ hours. They sang with their arms around each other and their hands gesturing dramatically during the mid-show momentum peak “You’re Gonna Go Far.” They sang into the camera lenses on their phones during the pre-encore finale, “Northern Attitude.” They sang louder than probably any local crowd since last year’s Taylor Swift audience to “Stick Season” at show’s end. Fans even passionately mouthed the lyrics during the tune Kahan introduced as being about “worms, decomposing bodies and sex” (“Everywhere, Everything”). It wasn’t as weird as he made it sound. At one point, the ponytailed singer made an aw-shucks kind of bet with the fans that most of them would not know the lyrics to “False Confidence,” an “oldie” from 2019. That comment helped make it one of the biggest singalongs of the night. The roar of the crowd was amplified by the fact that Kahan and his five-piece backing band never quite got very loud themselves. Mandolin, violin, banjo and acoustic guitar were the most prominently featured instruments. Drummer Marcos Valles barely ever got above a plodding foot-stomp beat of the Lumineers “Hey Ho” variety for the duration of the show. Amid all their midsong hugging and hand-holding choruses, though, the fans — a majority seeing Kahan for the first time — got a better idea who the nice, young man behind the songs really is. For starters, he proved to be quite the sharp-witted cut-up. While commenting on the enormity of the audience near the start of the set, for instance, he cracked, “I wish I hadn’t worn white pants cuz I might [pee] myself.” He’s quite the homeboy and Mama’s boy, too. A section of his stage’s giant video backdrop was fashioned after his family’s Vermont barn and acreage, and video images showed of his small hometown of Stafford, Vt. During a two-song acoustic montage with “Come Over” and “Godlight,” the stage was even transformed into his mom’s living room, complete with table lamps and real family photos. Kahan is also quite the earnest self-help guru and all-out friend to lean on. In songs like “False Confidence” and “You’re Gonna Go Far,” he opened up about his own insecurities and struggles while preaching self-love and mental-health awareness. “Pack up your car / Put a hand on your heart,” he sang in the latter tune. “Say whatever you feel / Be wherever you are.” How nice having songs like these shared on social media nowadays amid all the negative elements biting at kids’ self-confidence. So it was extra heartening hearing so many young fans intone those tunes word-for-word on Friday — even if the performance ultimately did prove too musically repetitious and middling by show’s end. Not that anyone who attended will sing along to that line.
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