Noah Kahan is one of ACL Fest’s fastest-rising stars — here’s why he pulled a massive crowd

“Figured there weren’t a lot of white guys on stage playing guitars by themselves,” singer-songwriter Noah Kahan joked to the audience Saturday at Austin City Limits Music Festival. The folk-pop phenomenon seemed to know that the trappings of his act seem … well, not unusual, let’s say. He can laugh at himself.

Listening at home to songs like the viral hit “Stick Season,” you’ll hear finger-strummy, wistful sounds that are warmly relatable, and anything but boundary breaking. Kahan yearns hard, his voice alternating between folky sing-patter and emotive yelps a la Ben Howard.

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Yet music fans have discovered that there is indeed something singular about the Vermont-born singer. In a short amount of time, Kahan has exploded in popularity: almost 18 million monthly listeners on Spotify, songs that have taken TikTok and Billboard by storm, and an upcoming stop at the Moody Center arena.

During Kahan’s Weekend 1 ACL Fest set on the T-Mobile stage, he exceeded the hype. That New England magic is real, it’s not taking itself too seriously, and it’s coming for you.

Kahan and his band launched their evening with “Northern Attitude,” a manifesto to what New England does to a person. “If I get too close and I'm not how you hoped/ Forgive my northern attitude, oh, I was raised out in the cold,” he sang, fingers rolling across the frets. Paired with the drums, the instrumentation almost sounded like a Cranberries song. Minus the “oh, oh, oh’s” filling the massive crowd — those placed Kahan’s tunes firmly in the conversation with fellow folky fest acts Mumford & Sons and The Lumineers.

“That’s a lot of people,” Kahan said after the song, looking into the park. “Holy (expletive).”

Onstage, Kahan’s an irrepressible presence: witty, self-deprecating and just the right amount of earnest. Not to throw around the word “relatability,” but dang, a big festival concert is a lot more enjoyable when you just like the guy you’re watching.

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“I’ve been called the Jewish Ed Sheeran,” he joked, offering a couple variations like Prozac Lin-Manuel Miranda and Folk Malone.

Kahan took a beat and said: “I can’t believe I’m here. What a (expletive) dream.” This writer teared up.

Song after song, the artist knocked it out of the park to the delight of the audience. And let’s note that he pulled an expectedly jumbo flock of fans for a pre-headliner set. Not Lizzo big, but maybe Lorde big.

“She Calls Me Back” shimmered with War on Drugs-esque guitars, the kind that sound like how oil spots on pavement look when the sun’s out. As a live performer, Kahan was expressive and interpretive, the song lyrics playing out on his face with popped eyes and furrowed brows. When he sang, his lungs spat out demons. Big emotions, bigger sounds.

On “New Perspective,” Kahan’s skill for lyrical hyper-specificity shined: “Liberal rednecks get drunk on a dirt road/ Attention deficit kids in their gym clothes/ Paper bags drift wherever the wind blows/ And mine's full of receipts.” (He also offered some hilarious advice to the kids in the audience before that song, about friends that get too big for their britches: “Listen kiddos … drag that ((expletive)) right back down with you.”)

Truly, Kahan’s emcee skills were as sharp as his musical ones. Before haunting “Everywhere, Everything,” he said the song was about worms (“We all got ‘em”). Ahead of “Your Needs, My Needs,” he said, “This is a song about Zoloft.”Kahan’s wry vulnerability has no doubt helped him amass a fanbase. He opened up from the stage about going to therapy at age 8, after his parents noticed signs of depression. He found it “wicked easy to lie” to his therapist, he said.

He’s 26 now — “Like an 1830s 26, where you had eight more years maybe before the scarlet fever took ya,” he clarified — and sang about that experience in the song “Growing Sideways.” The words were arresting: “I'm still angry at my parents for what their parents did to them/ But it's a start.”

The set roared to the end with songs like “Orange Juice,” a rollicking “Dial Drunk” and “The View Between Villages.” Right as he started to play breakout tune “Stick Season,” ACL Fest headliners Foo Fighters went on at the nearby American Express stage just a couple minutes early. And even as the walls of sound closed in on the fans who stuck around for Kahan, he held his own. He played one final song, going five minutes over.

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You can’t blame him for wanting to squeeze every drop out of the moment. Kahan said midway into the show, with gratitude spilling off of him, that he used to have to cancel Texas tour dates because he couldn’t sell the tickets.

But in Zilker Park on Saturday night, a fan held up a sign that asked Kahan to spit in their mouth. A girl lit up a joint when the sun set, and 20 feet away, a fan swayed to the music and gave their baby a bottle. Kahan’s big ACL moment had arrived.

As the crowd filled out under pastel Austin skies, a woman next to me exclaimed: “Yes, king!”

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Noah Kahan calls himself the 'Jewish Ed Sheeran' at ACL Fest