In Noah Kahan's Flannel World, You're the Main Character

An evening of teens and tears with the newly crowned prince of Stomp and Holler 2.0.

- Rebecca Alter

THE SAD, SWEAT-SOAKED flannel is the first thing I clock when I walk through the sunny open field turned parking lot to the BankNH New Hampshire, Pavilion in Gilford, where Gen Z's New England royalty, Noah Kahan, is playing his first of two sold-out headline shows for a crowd of 9,000 a pop amid an earlySeptember heat wave. That number may be a drop in the bucket compared to his 1.5 million followers on TikTok, but Kahan is a long way from where he was last year, playing for crowds of a couple hundred at small festivals. And his pop-inflected folk hits different in front of Northeasterners who have claimed him as their own.

Kahan sings from a perspective situated inside a childhood bedroom or from a passenger seat, staring out the windows onto familiar landscapes at the bleakest and most desolate times of the year, metaphors for sensitive-suburban-boy ennui. His fans say they like him for one of two reasons: his openness about mental health (he sings and posts extensively about depression and positive experiences with therapy) and the way his music captures what it's like to grow up in this region, an underexamined point of view versus the mythologized teendoms of, say, California or Texas.

There are tons of mothers and daughters here, younger teens in need of rides and supervision, and women in their early 20s whose own personal-favorite coming-ofage New England media is almost certainly Gilmore Girls. There are straight couples, too; blonde women and softboys who get it; a boyfriend with a Nalgene carabinered to his cargo shorts and a T-shirt that reads CORGZILLA with a corgi on it who walks by another boyfriend in a shirt that reads POODLE DAD. And: mohawk-mullet boyfriend. American-flag-print Vineyard Vines-whale boyfriend. Matching-tourshirts glasses boyfriend. There are also lots of lesbian couples and BFF duos holding hands.