Noah Kahan turned a Tuesday night at Wrigley Field into two hours of folk-star theater, and he did it with a grin that never quite let the sentiment get too comfortable. The 29-year-old was there as part of his Great Divide Tour, closing out the season at the park with a crowd that treated him like a headliner built for the moment.
That is why the show is drawing attention now. Fans started lining up in the morning even as the temperature peaked at 96, just shy of the 100-degree record set in 1998, and they stayed for a set that mixed hard-won confession with jokes about a pair of jeans that were three sizes too small. When Kahan said, “well, that’s not going to help my body dysmorphia,” he was doing what he often does: turning discomfort into a punch line before the room could settle into it.
The performance had weight because the songs did. On “Orange Juice,” Kahan sang openly about addiction and sobriety. On “Dan,” he gave a shoutout to his “best friend in the whole world.” On “The View Between Villages,” he pushed into depression and the search for a place in the world. Backing him was a six-piece hoedown band with fiddle, mandolin, electric and acoustic guitars, drums and keys, while panoramic video screens filled with bucolic Americana rolled behind him.
Then came the moment that made the night feel slightly unmoored from ordinary concert logic. Kahan picked up a ringing phone handed to him on stage and treated the call as if God himself had phoned in. The joke was that God wanted to congratulate him for getting a hole-in-one on Monday, and that he loved Kahan the most out of everybody in the world. It was absurd, self-mocking and, for a sold-out crowd that already knew every word, exactly the kind of deadpan turn that kept the room with him.
That friction is part of why Kahan is landing so hard with this audience. He joked, shrugged and undercut himself even while people were listening as if he were already a major folk name. The Wrigley Field concert lineup this year has been folk-focused, with Mumford & Sons and Tyler Childers also on the bill, and Kahan was closing out the season there. His two-night stint also followed a historic four-night run, a detail that suggests the park’s folk stretch has become a bigger draw than anyone would have guessed a few summers ago.
What comes next is the part the crowd will be watching for: whether Kahan’s run around Wrigley Field becomes a marker of how far his live show has moved, or just the latest stop in a tour that keeps growing louder around him. If Tuesday was any indication, he no longer needs to choose between being the punch line and being the voice in the room. He can be both, and the crowd will stay through the joke to hear the confession.
