I first heard of Noah Kahan in a cave in France this summer, when my 23-year-old daughter started wailing with distress at realising she had missed the chance to buy tickets to see him because she was in a cave when they went on sale (two shows at the Forum sold out in seconds). Kahan, a 26-year-old singer-songwriter from Vermont, has so far made very little impact on the world of the over-thirties, but his contemporaries and those a little younger adore him. If you Google reviews, you won’t find very much from the traditional music press or from big newspapers and magazines – but you’ll find plenty from student papers.
What they like so much about him is a little mysterious. He plays in a style identified by one Twitter wag as ‘stomp clap hey’: a little bit folky, a little bit raucous. Mumford & Sons and the Lumineers were the pioneers of ‘stomp clap hey’.
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