Noah Kahan: A Small Town Guy Putting the Upper Valley on the Map

If there’s one thing that Dartmouth students can agree on more than how much we hate 9Ls, it’s how quiet the Upper Valley can be. We’re nestled between a few sleepy towns and some scattered farms, on a campus that’s a mere speck on the New England landscape. For those of us less inclined to embrace the outdoors with a skiing or hiking trip, our weekend activities are limited to apple-picking and visits to the farmers’ market. It’s fair to say that besides Dartmouth’s campus, there isn’t exactly anything remarkable about the area. However, in recent years, Hanover High alumnus and musician Noah Kahan has launched the Upper Valley onto the cultural map.

Kahan’s most recent and successful album, Stick Season, draws inspiration from his rural upbringing in Strafford, Vermont—a quaint town with a population of around 1,000 people. Yet fans from all over idolize his music as though they’re small-town New Englanders, too. This sensationalism guarantees that you’ll never be able to get tickets to one of his concerts. His music simultaneously romanticizes and exposes the realities of rural life, making non-New Englanders long for a taste of a simpler, quieter life in the country. It’s certainly pretty—if you can overlook the cold, the isolation, the average food, and the fact that there are no restaurant open past 9pm. 

When Noah Kahan performed in Vermont, perhaps most every Dartmouth student’s Instagram was flooded with concert footage. Apparently, we’ve convinced ourselves that we have some sort of innate connection to Kahan because we go to college just 20 miles from his hometown, and now, suddenly, we all have a newfound appreciation for folk music. We must understand what it’s like to live in the Upper Valley. After all, we’ve survived the Hanover snow, the dreary November “Stick Season,” and, this summer, rain that seems to never end. We understand the stifling small-town life he describes, where you run into past friends at every corner. We’ve even adopted a “Northern Attitude,” our collective coping mechanism for the sun’s lengthy departure in winter.

Most of us, however, aren’t authentic New Englanders. We merely wear the Patagonia quarter-zip and the L.L. Bean boots to fit in. Our connection with this place is fleeting. After our four years are up, we head for the cities and leave our college life behind, knowing that when we return “the town’s the same as [we] left it.” This is the peculiar irony of our relationship with Kahan and our attempted adoption of his world. Our insulated college experiences imitate small-town life, but it’s not the same as Kahan’s upbringing. While we may live in the area Kahan describes, we aren’t that different from every other fan claiming to relate.

Kahan may occasionally join us for a basketball game at Alumni Gym, as he did just last month, but he views us as transient visitors. He sees our social lives and gets “tired of the frat boys with their brights on,” bothered by our disruption of small town tranquility. Kahan played at Collis when he was just starting out, but it’s unlikely we’ll ever get him again for Green Key. That isn’t to say we will never. Keep playing “Dial Drunk” as your theme song for your trips to the river, and maybe one day he’ll overhear…

Despite Dartmouth’s prestige, not many from our generation have heard of, let alone could locate, the Upper Valley. Noah Kahan renders the charm and tribulations of his unique small-town upbringing comprehensible to a global audience. His music has placed us on the cultural map. Even if most Dartmouth students won’t ever be true Upper Valley residents, when we return and drive through Hanover, perhaps Kahan’s music, and “The View Between Villages,” will help us remember “the things that [we] lost here, the people [we] knew.”