By Emma Weidmann | Editor-in-Chief
In the quiet moments before a performance, even when it’s just him, singer-songwriter Jonah Kagen has no backstage ritual. He doesn’t drink beforehand because he’s already too much of a “loose cannon” on stage when sober, he said, and he’s not really the superstitious type.
“I don’t need to tap the corner three times before I go out… I don’t believe that that does anything for me, but I do very much believe that there’s something special about those moments that you share with people,” Kagen said. “And I think there is something supernatural about music in general and about love and people’s connection to music and the human element of music. So I believe in that, and I think that is what I feel when I’m just acting like a person.”
On stage at Austin City Limits, Kagen is solitary, just one man with a guitar and a loop pedal looking out into dusty, sweltering Zilker Park. But he’s not alone when the crowd joins him in synchronized claps and chants to “Save My Soul” and “God Needs the Devil,” and his gritty, soulful growl takes up the space of a five-piece band.
His music is deeply personal, like if Noah Kahan were from Savannah, Ga. and had grown up around old Southern streets and the oppressive buzz of cicadas in the summertime instead of the intense, foggy firs of Vermont. The similar spellings of their names is not lost on Kagen, as he quips on stage that fans may accidentally buy Kahan’s merch instead of his own if their finger slips.
ACL’s T-Mobile stage last weekend was just one stop on a long journey for the singer. Kagen, 24, lives out of a silver bullet Airstream bus that doubles as a studio, and he said he’s learning a lot about being a person through life on the road. Having left home at 14 to attend boarding school and graduating from Cornell where he was the co-captain of the soccer team, he said he grew up in a “bubble.”
“The moment you get out and actually go trying to see something, you realize it’s so much bigger. There’s so much beauty,” Kagen said. “And there’s so much culture around that way of life too.”
Once, he ran out of gas on the highway — his fault, he admitted, for letting it get too low — and skateboarded down the road at 1 a.m. That may sound dangerous to some, but it’s the sort of excitement that Kagen chases.
“If I were to die tomorrow, I don’t want people’s experience with me to be like, ‘Oh, he had a lot of money,'” Kagen said. “He stayed in one place his whole entire life. Yeah, he was great. This guy was a great accountant’ — nothing against accountants.”
The first time his Airstream broke down, however, was the beginning of an unlikely episode. After asking a man for help, the two talked for hours, exchanging stories and traumas. The man was a Marine who had been honorably discharged after a serious back injury he sustained clearing a path for snipers in Afghanistan. Kagen said after a while, they forgot they were even trying to jump his car in the first place. When they finally parted ways, Kagen said they were “jumping up and down and giving each other hugs.”
Stories like these from the open road are sure to make it onto a few tracks. His discography is, after all, almost entirely autobiographical.
“Every single one of [the songs] is something that I have at least some very deep connection to,” Kagen said. “I found a while ago that I didn’t like any of the stuff that I was writing that wasn’t a little scary and that wasn’t something that I connected to personally. I really admire people who write that way, but I found that I feel like I’m not doing the service that I want to be doing if I’m not just kind of baring my own soul a little bit.”
In Austin, he played the yet-unreleased “Chrissy,” a song that celebrates the “insane” story of his mother, who he said prints all of his merch T-shirts. The song is intimate and heartbreaking and raw. In the audience, people put hands over their hearts as they swayed, and several lyrics earned sympathetic swoons.
The authenticity in his lyricism comes from his belief that being a musician is a “service job.” If you’re not peeling back the layers, telling the honest truth, you’re doing the listener a disservice, Kagen said.
“That’s where the magic is in the songs,” Kagen said. “Somebody sees themselves in it. Something might be hyper-specific to you and very personal, but in that way, it’s almost way more relatable to the audience.”
In an unreleased song written in the midst of his breakup, Kagen takes the words of an ex-girlfriend that he said were “just ringing.” Though the words are only for Kagen to know just yet, he said when a song gets released, the story behind it and the emotion it conveys are no longer his to dictate.
“Once a song’s out, I don’t think it’s mine. I think when I put it out, it’s whatever whoever needs it wants it to be,” Kagen said.
