Noah Kahan’s Dallas Concert Proves He’s a Musical Mental Health Maestro

After the sun died and the last of the sky’s purple turned black, Noah Kahan dedicated a song to “all children of divorce.” It’s not your fault, he reminded the audience. He would know: The 27-year-old singer-songwriter is himself a child of a divorce, and, as he told the crowd, it’s clear where the fault lies: “Your fucking dad.”

This acidic wit was a cornerstone of Kahan’s sold-out “We’ll All Be Here Forever” tour stop at Dos Equis Pavilion, which served as a showcase of his often depressing yet usually cathartic catalog.

After a fitting opener from talented folk singer John Vincent III, Kahan kicked off with “Dial Drunk,” which, sadly, did not include a surprise guest appearance from Grapevine’s own Post Malone, who is featured on one popular version of the song. It was a high-energy opener for a show that fluctuated between peaks and valleys: somber songs one moment, explosive barn-burners the next. To be fair, that’s Kahan’s style:

Songs like “Your Needs, My Needs” and “The View Between Villages” start subdued but build and build, crescendoing into a throat-burning, mad-at-the-world ending which Kahan belts at full volume. He likes to complement these builds with wild-eye stares; the whites of his eyes would have been visible far from the stage even without the assistance of the massive screens on either side of him and his band. Kahan had fun with those screens, admitting that even he couldn’t help but look at them and see how sweaty he was.

Between tunes, his self-deprecating banter alternated between the hilarious (“I look like a youth pastor: ‘Jesus Christ had rizz!”) to the endearingly earnest (“This song is about Zoloft, which, if you’ve never taken it, you should really consider it.”)

The prevailing theme was mental health, a cause Kahan fans will know is at the heart of many of his songs and a lot of his off-stage activity. He created The Busyhead Project to promote mental health resources and address the stigma around getting help, and at each stop of his tour, the project sets up an “Action Village” at the venue to spotlight local mental health organizations alongside a community wall on which fans can scrawl positive messages.

It’s this kind of caring touch that contributes to the Kahan vibe: It’s not just that he encourages fans to go to therapy, it’s the fact you can tell he means it. This feeling is reinforced by practically all of his songs, which carried an intimate, always relatable feel in Dallas despite the epic sound created by his backing band.

Songs such as “False Confidence” (a poppy reflection on imposter syndrome) and “New Perspective” tackle the doldrums of youth and American life in a way that’s incisive but never cruel, boasting lyrics like, “This town is for the record now / The intersection got a Target / And they’re calling it downtown.” At moments like this, the bare Fair Park Ferris wheel overlooking the venue was a perfect complement to the show, offering an eerie reinforcement of the sadness of the American experience.

Elsewhere, songs such as “Growing Sideways” (part of his solo set in Dallas) cut right to the bone when Kahan sings to his audience, “Why’s pain so damn impatient? Ain’t like it’s got a place to be.” The track illustrates how it feels to live with the mental health struggles Kahan has confronted most of his life, especially when they’re left to their own devices and you try to soldier on. The 1975’s Matty Healy chides himself on one of his band’s songs for “making an aesthetic out of not doing well.” In Dallas, and throughout his career thus far, Noah Kahan has effectively done the opposite – making an aesthetic of trying to get better, more healthy.

Early in the show, he filled the stage with photos from his youth in an effort to reflect his childhood living room (minus the generational trauma, he noted). Then he and three of his bandmates sat down in front of the pictures for a few songs driven by acoustic guitar, banjo and violin. The thesis seemed clear: Trauma and nostalgia can live side by side. In fact, it’s hard to have one without the other, and a true reckoning with both is how you make it through. After a set piece like that, it was easy to think of the rest of the show as a healing ritual or celebration of sorts, especially when an electrifying performance of “Northern Attitude” – a tonal collision of heartbreak and joy – was complement by faux snow falling from the rafters.

One of the night’s other vibe-fortifying moments came in the form of a tweet. Kahan used those extra-large screens to share a screenshot of a post he made on June 25, 2019: “Yo,” it begins, “ain’t nobody in Texas wants to come see me play and it’s genuinely breaking my heart please if you in Houston Austin or Dallas buy a ticket or else I will cry for 6 straight hours into a mason jar and straight up drink that shit T Pain style (tiny desk version).”

The tweet, he later explained, was a nod to one of his earliest shows at Club Dada, where he looked out on a half-empty crowd. (This was one of the good nights, he said; he’s canceled plenty of his shows due to lack of attendance.) Now that he has no problem selling out massive venues, he wants to capitalize on those numbers.

“In my own life and career, I feel like things have continued to build for me in small ways, and I want to make sure that my passion for talking about mental health and raising money for it is following the growth of like, my venue capacity, and my staff,” he recently told Billboard. “I’m a big believer in striking while the iron is hot – if you see my tour schedule, you understand that – but along with that is taking moments where there is momentum and visibility, and doing as much good as possible.”

There was ample momentum at the Dallas show, which ended, naturally, with “Stick Season”: the song that buoyed the singer into a new stratosphere of popularity a couple years ago. Kahan donned a Dallas Stars jersey for the song, shrugging as he did so. It was a cheeky bit of local fan service that still felt wholesome. In other words, it was classic Kahan.