My father always used to say driving through the mountain pass was a choice. I can still see the roguish smirk on his face as he navigated the sharp twists of Route 108 north in the Peugeot station wagon that I was destined to destroy four years later, days after getting my driver’s license. It was all a bit of a show for him, acting like some mountain man hauling his beater over the hills, as opposed to a transplanted flatlander in his import, dodging the hordes of leaf peepers.
Maybe I was just thinking of him when I drove the same pass last week, but I felt like I, too, was making a choice — and perhaps being overdramatic about the whole thing.
You see, for months I had been planning to be at Higher Ground in South Burlington that night for the one and only Deltron 3030, legends of hip-hop and the soundtrack to approximately 75 percent of all bong hits in the year 2000, when their self-titled debut dropped. But as with Deltron Zero, the main character of that dystopian concept album, fate had other plans for me. I decided to face the strange.
I went to the Noah Kahan golf tournament concert.
Let me back up for a second. Kahan, the Strafford-born singer-songwriter and bona fide international pop star, hosted a golf tournament and concert at Spruce Peak in Stowe on October 1 to benefit the Busyhead Project, his charity supporting mental health. (They went with Folk & Fairways as the name, though I would have chosen Stomp Clap Hey — Fore!) Tickets were scarce and expensive, with Vermont residents getting a chance to snag show-only tickets alongside those who paid for golf stuff, too.
After I parked my car and joined the steady flow of fans heading for the gondola that would whisk us up to the outdoor concert, I started to feel that special air of exclusivity. (I mean, you caught the whole “heading for the gondola” thing, right? Was I too subtle?) People were understandably buzzing at the rare chance to see Kahan in a relatively intimate environment.
Stuffed with another passenger into a gondola car, I was soon climbing high above the parking lot toward Spruce Peak Village. Deltron Zero’s words from “Turbulence” came to mind: “In a hovercraft, not no bubble-bath, turbo-boost / Fuck Earth, I want to live on Mars so I’m closer to the stars.”
“I saw him at Fenway,” my gondola mate told me, as if she couldn’t tell I was contemplating Dan the Automator’s sci-fi noir production.
“Yeah?” I replied. “That’s a baseball stadium, and now a golf tournament show. Is there a sports pattern? And I’m not judging, by the way. I’d play soccer with Iron Maiden.”
“I don’t know who that is,” she replied, and I don’t think she meant it in a mean way.
“I’m just saying, if I liked golf and was famous, I’d host a tourney, too. That wouldn’t be weird,” I said.
“It’s not weird.”
“I know, I just said it’s not weird.”
“This is all for charity, though. Isn’t that fucking awesome?” she asked me, flashing a grin.
And it is awesome. I’d like to think that if I went from a largely unknown Vermont kid trying to make it as a songwriter in LA to a global phenomenon rubbing shoulders and collaborating with the likes of Post Malone, Zach Bryan and Kacey Musgraves, I’d put time and money into something like the Busyhead Project. The nonprofit has raised more than $4.5 million since launching in 2023.
I streamed out with a gaggle of puffy coat-wearing Kahan fans, all headed for the stage. There was a familial feel to it all, with kids running around the lawn and couples looking like they were getting ready for après-ski. I don’t catch a lot of shows at resorts, so it was hard to ignore the fanciness of the whole shebang, but I’ll give it to Kahan: If you’re going to play a resort and golf tournament for the jet-set class, show up in a Canadian tuxedo.
Kahan walked out to rapturous applause in a full-denim troutfit, complete with embroidered fish on his sleeves and pant legs. I made a joke about his next record being called Fish Season, but my only audience was the kid handing out free potato chips, who just looked at me with that Gen Z thousand-yard blankness that always reminds me of Children of the Corn.
“His last record was called Stick Season,” I said, trying to explain the joke, but the kid had already moved on, intent on off-loading the box of chips. Who gave him the chips? I wondered. Why was he handing them out? Was this the sort of thing that happens at golf tournament concerts?
I shrugged off the mystery as Kahan launched into a solo set. The dude has been playing massive stages with a full band for the better part of three years; the days of him and an acoustic guitar alone onstage are now few and far between. Nonetheless, he soon had the crowd in the palm of his hand as he played through hits like “Dial Drunk” and “Northern Attitude.”
He attempted Irish singer-songwriter Hozier’s trademark howl on the latter, failing miserably and laughing as he said, “Respect to Hozier. I can’t do that shit, though!” The crowd laughed with him, charmed. When he said hi to his mom, who was sitting somewhere with friends and family in the VIP area, much of the crowd waved as well.
The set was pretty short, but I didn’t get the sense that anyone felt cheated. Quite the opposite: The crowd seemed thrilled to have gotten a little, quasi-private slice of a musician who increasingly belongs to a larger world. No one I talked to cared that much about when Kahan would release his follow-up to Stick Season, which came out in 2022.
“It’ll be great, but it can’t be another Vermont tribute,” one fan said as we all headed back for the gondola. “He’s told us all where he’s from, his roots, you know? I think he’s got to break the wheel a little — go electric like Bob Dylan at Newport.”
I rode the gondola alone and headed back to the parking lot with Deltron 3030’s “Mastermind” in my head. “His logic impress a hypnotic effect / yeah, a latent patent, you could call it a gift / Man, he all in the mix, nuclear physicist / Genetically tailored every bit of this stimulus.”
Kahan has created and nurtured his own ecosystem of fans, his Busyheads, who will show up as a mass of screaming college kids at a football stadium or as a select crew of nicely dressed upper-crusters at a ski resort. And in either locale, he remains the same: a dude and his guitar, singing about what to do when you get sad. There’s a timelessness to that approach that explains his appeal — if one were looking to, anyway.
If I was, I found my answer. I made my choice. I went to the mountain, and then I drove back down it, trying to emulate my dad’s grin as I blasted Deltron 3030’s “State of the Nation.”
The original print version of this article was headlined “Noah Kahan v. Deltron 3030 (or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Gondola)”
This article appears in Oct 8-14 2025.
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