Kahan's show featured a surprise duet with Chappell Roan on her song 'California' before getting back to the land of sticks. 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? 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. 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.
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.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
