Noah Kahan Turns a Rain-Soaked Festival Into a Dry Inside Joke

Rain soaked the Hutton Brickyards in Kingston, New York, for most of Saturday. By the time Noah Kahan walked onstage for Rolling Stone’s inaugural Stateside festival, the sky had cleared, but the mood had already been set by weather that demanded resilience. Kahan met it with a joke. “We’re gonna play some music that makes you feel just miserable tonight,” he told the crowd. “We want this to be the fucking most depressing Fourth of July of our lives.”

What followed was far from miserable. Kahan opened with “American Cars,” the uptempo rock cut from his new album The Great Divide, which debuted at Number One on the Billboard 200 and landed him on the cover of Rolling Stone. Dressed in a red t-shirt, hair pulled into his signature man bun, he tore into the song with a grin that undercut the dry humor. The 4,000 fans who stuck out the storms—known as Busyheads—sang back with a force that made the intimate riverside setting feel larger than a stadium.

Kahan is in the middle of a sold-out arena tour, but the Stateside set had a distinct weight. The festival was held at a historic brickworks that once supplied materials for the Empire State Building, a fitting backdrop for an issue of Rolling Stone honoring American icons. A portion of each ticket was donated to Kahan’s BusyHead Project, the nonprofit he founded to fight the stigma around mental health and improve access to care. It gave the night a second layer, beyond the music or the fireworks that never came.