Noah Kahan’s highly anticipated fourth studio album, “The Great Divide,” has dominated the charts since its release. The album spent three weeks at the top of the Billboard 200, and all 21 tracks charted in the top 100 upon release, with the song “Doors” peaking at number nine.
Kahan has always been upfront about mental health themes in his music. “Stick Season’s” opening track, “Northern Attitude,” sees the singer apologizing to someone for being cold and detached, but instead blames it on being raised in a cold environment rather than on his personal attitudes and behaviors. “Orange Juice” deals with the homecoming of someone he loves after they got sober. The closing track, “The View Between Villages,” explores the complex emotions that come with returning home, even just passing by it on a drive. That leads perfectly into “The Great Divide’s” quiet opening, “End of August,” with the songs even sharing similar references.
Noah Kahan, however, is the next part of what a new generation of artists is valuing. Mental health and advocacy are at the forefront of popular music more than ever.
Kahan’s nonprofit organization, Busyhead, which shares the name of his debut album, supports community-based mental health organizations. According to the organization’s website, it has raised over $6 million since being founded in 2023. Kahan has used his fame to benefit the organization through exclusive merch, acting as a fundraiser, and the sale of select concert tickets.
Kahan is not the only artist to have a charity related to common themes in their art; Chappell Roan’s The Midwest Princess Project has raised $592,601 for organizations that benefit LGBTQ+ communities, with a specific focus on trans youth, in just over two months since its founding in late October of 2025. Roan is another newly famous artist who has been very up front about her own mental health and how fame has affected that.
In an interview with The Guardian, Roan discusses navigating newfound fame and bipolar disorder, openly sharing that she is using a combination of medication and therapy to work through her new life. Roan also infamously asserts very clear boundaries to protect her mental health, such as occasionally refusing photos, which has left some fans disappointed and questioning whether Roan can live as a “celebrity.”
As a part of the rollout for his new album, Noah Kahan also released the documentary “Out of Body” on Netflix. The documentary follows Kahan through some of the biggest shows of his career and the early stages of making “The Great Divide.” Kahan gives viewers a look into his childhood, family, and most notably his personal struggles with body dysmorphia as he tries to create an honest look into his new life. This is not a new move from artists. There have been many attempts by musicians to humanize themselves. A recent example is Taylor Swift’s docuseries “The End of an Era.” This is not the megastar’s first documentary; 2020’s “Miss Americana” offers a look at Swift right before her 30th birthday and the aftermath of her six-year retreat from the public eye.
Only six years after that, Swift is on an entirely different level of fame, and “The End of an Era” is an attempt to capture what made the singer into the true force in music we know her as now. The series, however, began the story at a very emotional point.
In the last two stops of the European leg of “The Eras Tour,” Swift was forced to cancel the three shows scheduled in Vienna, Austria, over a planned act of terrorism. The series was already planned to start filming at the Vienna tour stop, but instead captured Swift at an incredibly vulnerable moment as she dealt with the aftermath.
Swift has had her share of issues with fame. Her 2020 documentary sees her open up about being in recovery from an eating disorder. The track “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” off her 2024 album “The Tortured Poets Department” discusses feeling pressured to perform through some of the toughest moments of her life. She has also been incredibly open about getting off of social media to protect her own mental health.
Music dealing with mental health is nothing new. It became more prevalent throughout the 1980s and 90s as alternative music grew in popularity. This came in many forms, from the band that popularized the all-black aesthetic worn by goth and emo subcultures, “The Cure,” to the angrier grunge of “Nirvana.” Those bands paved the way for pop-punk and third-wave emo that dominated the 2000s with the political rage contained in Green Day’s 2004 “American Idiot” or the teenage angst found in My Chemical Romance’s 2006 “The Black Parade.”
In modern day, some of the same ideas have made their way into pop songs. Olivia Rodrigo’s 2021 debut album, “Sour,” wraps adolescence and the early roots of fame in light purple and butterfly stickers, with tracks like “brutal,” “deja vu,” and “jealousy, jealousy.” Rodrigo has actually forged relationships with many of the 80s and 90s alternative singers who brought mental health into music, bringing artists like The Talking Heads’ David Byrne, The Cure’s Robert Smith, and Weezer out as special guests on her recent world tour. Sabrina Carpenter captures her emotions on the internet, suddenly seeming to turn on her over the details of one of her past relationships in 2022’s “emails i can’t send.” Doechii’s 2025 track “Anxiety” documents the rapper’s own experience with panic attacks.
Gen Z is the right generation to move mental health out of the alternative and into the mainstream. The National Institute of Mental Health reported that young adults (ages 18-25) are experiencing higher rates of mental illness than those older than them. However, two out of every five Gen Zers are in therapy, with over half having sought professional mental health treatment at some point. It makes sense that Gen Z artists are being more forward about their mental health because it is exactly what their non-famous peers are doing. And as Gen Z starts to become the generation shaping popular culture, mental health becomes more prevalent, and more artists start to open up about their mental health.
Music is a deeply personal thing. A sophomore at Milton High School, Grace Daniel likes hearing artists sing about mental health more because “when they sing about something I can relate to, it makes me feel less alone in depression and grief”. Another student at Milton, Maria Scobey, has a playlist titled “Songs for a Sunny Day” filled with music that makes her happy. As more artists incorporate their own mental health experiences into their art, they become more relatable to their audience rather than appearing like elusive megastars.
In Noah Kahan’s documentary “Out of Body,” his producer, Gabe Simon, remarks that “I think that artists and children are very similar. The only difference is that when a child runs toward the street, you want to grab them. But when an artist does, you kind of just let them get hit by cars. Because it’s kind of the most important thing for them; that’s when the best stuff comes out.”
