St James Church in St Andrews sits on the aggressive coastline of the North Sea. The ocean is mean, crashing outside the stained glass windows, but inside, people put their heads down, and only hear what they need to. It’s so rainy here, but in that church, every Sunday, people clamber in, regardless of the weather. Perhaps it is a mark of their regeneration for the week, the month, the year, the time between them and God. A centre for faith, hope, closed eyes and clasped hands. My friend Erin is one of these people, and she invited me to Mass one Sunday. I’m not Catholic, but I enjoy Erin’s company very much and I wanted to see what it was that was so important to her. I also had an hour to spare.

It was the perfectly confused winter day—at once summery and bright, but the air was so crisp it began to pierce my skin through all the layers. It felt like ‘The Great Divide’ by Noah Kahan, the lead single of the same-name album that releases 24 April.

There weren’t enough seats for me that day in Mass. I mean, there may have been, had I stayed longer than five minutes, but I felt suddenly constricted and like I was taking up someone else’s space. Someone who really needed faith that day. The banjo melody from ‘The Great Divide’ began to play in my head. In that moment, I was reminded of the strummed electric guitar, the driven drums, and of course, the deep vulnerability and emotional fervour entwined in the lyrics.

I think this situation is what Kahan is writing to. The apology to the people who really, really need faith, for taking up space that could never have been filled by you in the first place.

‘The Great Divide’, like many of Kahan’s songs, is a reflection on and an admission of his wrongdoing. An ex-friend whose issues Kahan ignored until this friend turned to God. Ignorance is at the centre of their issues, as is, as usual, miscommunication. It seems in music, he finds apology comes naturally, and this lead single is no different. He’s writing to someone who lost themselves while they were close to Kahan, and how he ignored their suffering, perhaps on purpose. This person then turned to God, and Kahan alludes this was to their detriment, with an overt focus on their “soul, and what He might do with it.”

In the lyrics, there’s an element of growing up together: “We got cigarette burns on the same side of our hands,” but the internal rhyme, “we ain’t friends”, establishes a distance that is the overture of this song. It is, after all, ‘The Great Divide’.

When reading thoughts doesn’t work anymore, when all you can do is think about them “all the time,” and your “deep misunderstanding” of their life, what can you do besides hope? Kahan ironically turns to blind faith; hoping their life is okay, good even, and that they’re no longer scared of the God they chose to worship, but instead scared of “ordinary shit.” To that I ask: is it not mostly fear of ‘ordinary shit’ that makes people turn to God in the first place? Is it not his fear of having been a let-down for this friend—ordinary shit—that is now making Kahan turn to a very similar blind faith, to “hope”?

It’s beautiful and heart-swelling, how paradoxical and confused Kahan seems. He begins as a child who is trying to make sense why this person left, why he was not a strong friend, and finally, in the growth: “I’m finally aware how shitty and unfair it was to stare ahead like everything was fine.” In his previous album Stick Season, this unfairness was spread across many things, but the blame lay mostly on where he was raised: “I’m mean because I grew up in New England,” he offered in ‘Homesick’, off Stick Season. Now, he sees himself for his own errors with great clarity, and without the need to blame geography or without victimising. Kahan’s opening this new era with growth—a divide between who he was, and the person he is now, who actually believes in difference. Regenerating within this new album cycle, where Stick Season sought to illustrate the place he grew up, it seems The Great Divide may reflect on the people he met there, and how hindsight is only a small part of reflection. Faith, in anything, is the larger portion.

Anyway, I haven’t stopped thinking about Mass that day. I left the church, through a literal sea of people waiting for their time to connect with their faith, and I walked back past The Scores, past a pale blue sky or the North Sea—at that point, I couldn’t really tell. I played ‘The Great Divide’ and thought about this review. About how I needed to connect it to something, a picture, a scene, an anecdote, for it to actually mean something. For it to be understood. Otherwise, it would feel too much like blind faith.

Walking home from my failed attempt at church, I watched the sun set over the ocean. I wished I could understand why there were some places “I wasn’t brave enough to go,” and felt happy I felt brave enough to be where I was, then. 600 meters away, people felt that same feeling in their pews.

The divide is not as great as we fear.