![]() I’m clearly not the only one who loves this song, as I hear all the voices singing along. His bandmate reminds him that he skipped my favourite song, and he plays Please, the one that reminds me of his ability to string words together like Jason Mraz. It plays like a tribute, and it’s a beautiful one. “I play it every time I go somewhere cool,” he says, and it is sombre and tender at first but wells up into a powerful chorus with a gorgeous bridge. The depth of his experience seems too much for someone so young when after the insightful False Confidence, about Kahan’s disdain for marketing himself, he plays Carlos, a song he wrote for a buddy who passed away, who loved to travel. He tells a story next about how he met his manager at 16 years old after putting Sink on Soundcloud under a pseudonym, and I wonder suddenly how old this dude is. Before he plays Hallelujah, he pays lip service to the anti-Trump emotion shared by every artist I’ve seen in the last two years, and thanks his band, without whom, he says, he “would be the Jewish Ed Sheeran.” He mentions the “sad shit” but the thing with Noah Kahan is that his lyrics are so well-written and so relatable, you don’t end up feeling sadder… you end up feeling understood. The audience continues to clap along but can’t overshadow his strong and gorgeous voice, and I’m reminded why I haven’t tired of the four Noah Kahan songs pretty much on repeat on my driving playlist. The happy continues with Passenger and the pre-chorus “take me, my heart and my soul/pick me apart and look inside, inside/Fill me with dreams I can’t hold/Keep me afloat in this cold world, cold world” gives me the lyrical poetry I’ve been craving. Noah Kahan gets on stage at 9pm sharp and opens with the country-inspired foot-stomper Fine and the energy immediately shifts from “sad shit” to optimistic. After seven songs too many, I decide that Edwin Raphael’s music is sad but forgettable, not haunting. Isle of Strawberries follows and Thrills Sought After which is a boring song about someone wanting more coke at 2am. It just doesn’t feel genuine, and maybe he is just an awkward guy but I’m reminded of all the douchebags I dated in my twenties and some of them could play the guitar or write poetry and play the victim but they always ghosted me and/or I caught them dating someone else and/or gave me that tortured artist excuse. They sing along, play along, even though he’s talking to them like kindergarteners and saying “good job” and “beautiful, beautiful”. The audience gets involved, waiving cell phones in lieu of lighters. ![]() He tells us it’ll be “a vocal lesson for you guys” and as usual, it works. Miss the Sun is next, and this one, he warns, is “super fucking sad, sadder than before.” He asks for audience participation but it feels really contrived. It’s too bad, because this latest song is pretty good, and he’s doing some more interesting vocals, changing speed and pitch. Mind you, the lyrics haven’t improved: “and you used to fight it over in my head/but now I see a lot clearer, bye bye/and you used to fight it over in my bed/but now I see a lot clearer, bye bye.” They gave him the hush for the first few songs and laughed at his jokes but they’re over it. ![]() He plays two more songs, one he wrote two weeks ago… that could probably use a little more love and Green Eyes. It sounds a lot like the previous song, with a slightly catchier chorus. He starts the show off with Tangerine Skies, then banters with the audience and moves into Colder. He’s jocular and welcoming, and h e starts out the way Noah Kahan did when I saw him opening for George Ezra back in April, by letting the audience know he’s going to play a couple of sad songs for us. The green spotlight makes him and his bandmate look ghoulish, and the event coordinator in me wants to tell the lighting technician to switch it up for something softer. I notice this even before Edwin Raphael, the opening act, points out that he’s the only brown dude in the room. It’s a sea of shiny hair – stylish teens, their parents, and a couple handfuls of 30-50 year-olds an overwhelmingly white crowd. I arrive at Café Campus to a sold-out show, and notice right away that the venue is unusually full for 7:45pm… the opener goes on at 8pm and if I wasn’t reviewing this show I might have skipped it since I found out that Dean Lewis, who is supposed to be warming us up, lost his voice and won’t be performing tonight.
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