All Them Horses

There is a specific kind of anguish in being far from home when something terrible happens there. Not the grief of direct witness, but the second-hand horror of watching through photographs and news alerts while life continues elsewhere: the sound check, the tour bus, the pre-show ritual. Noah Kahan channeled that anguish into "All Them Horses," a song from his fourth studio album The Great Divide that fixes its gaze on one of the strangest and most heartbreaking images from the catastrophic Vermont floods of July 2023: horses caught in the rising water, calm in a way that somehow made everything worse.

The Summer Vermont Drowned

In mid-July 2023, Vermont experienced its worst flooding in nearly a century. Record rainfall drove rivers far beyond their banks, swamping towns and farms across the state.^[1] The damage hit rural communities with particular force, the kind of loss that is harder to quantify when the land and the people have been neighbors for generations.

Kahan, by then, was no longer in Vermont. His third album, Stick Season, had made him one of the most talked-about songwriters of his generation. He was on tour, playing arenas and festivals, living the exact life his years of small-room struggle had been building toward. When the floods hit, he was nowhere near Strafford.

He responded in the most direct way he could: he livestreamed his sold-out Red Rocks Amphitheatre performance in Colorado, directing the proceeds toward Vermont flood relief, ultimately raising roughly $190,000 for his home state.^[1] It was a meaningful act. It was also, as "All Them Horses" makes clear, not enough to quiet the guilt.

The song made its public debut at a live show in Charleston in late November 2024, where Kahan introduced it as a tribute to Vermont.^[2] It would eventually take its place near the end of The Great Divide, an album whose central theme is the widening distance between Kahan and the people and places he loves most.

The Innocence of Horses

The horses are the heart of the song. They are not a metaphor Kahan reaches for abstractly; they are specific animals from an actual flood, described in a way that lands like a gut punch. The narrator reflects on the memory of animals caught in the deluge, and what lingers is not their panic but the opposite: a kind of serene incomprehension. They did not look scared.

That detail is devastating precisely because of what it implies about how fear works, and what we fear on behalf of others. The horses cannot grasp the scale of the disaster. They cannot feel the weight of historical context, the insurance calls, the destroyed crops, the months of rebuilding ahead. They are simply there, in the water, without the burden of understanding.

For the narrator, watching from a distance, that calmness becomes almost unbearable. In the song's emotional logic, it is easier to process suffering that looks like suffering. The horses, with their unfrightened faces, hold a kind of terrible dignity. They endure because they do not know what else to do.

That image widens the song's emotional range beyond a simple account of guilt. It becomes a meditation on innocence and exposure, on what we cannot protect and what we cannot explain away.

The Weight of the Working Road

"All Them Horses" belongs to a recurring preoccupation in Kahan's work: the cost of leaving.^[3] Stick Season and much of his catalog wrestle with the anxiety of growing up in a small, isolated community and the complicated feelings of departing it. What "All Them Horses" adds is something more specific: not the ambiguous guilt of going out into the world, but the acute guilt of being absent during a crisis.

The narrator knows, intellectually, that the flooding made travel difficult. The roads were impassable. Home was unreachable. But that knowledge does not dissolve the feeling. It is not really about whether coming back was possible. It is about the fact that his life had taken him so far from the rhythms of the place that formed him that when Vermont needed solidarity of presence, of shared suffering, he could only watch.

This is the central tension running through The Great Divide as an album. Kahan has spoken about the record as his attempt to stare across the emotional distance that fame has opened between himself and the people he loves most, including his parents, old friends, and the Vermont landscape.^[4][5] "All Them Horses" is one of the album's most direct examinations of that distance, and one of its most honest about how it feels when the cost of being away becomes concrete.

Vermont as Sacred Ground

Vermont's 2023 floods were not just a regional news story. They drew national attention as one of the most significant natural disasters in New England in recent memory, arriving in the context of growing public awareness of climate change's impact on landscapes and communities previously thought to be relatively insulated.^[1]

For Kahan, who has built an artistic identity inseparable from the terrain, seasons, and emotional textures of his home state, the floods were not an abstract event.^[3] Vermont is not background scenery in his music; it is the engine of it. Songs about the gray weeks between autumn foliage and first snow, about back roads and cold rivers and the particular melancholy of small-town New England life, these are not decorative. They are the substance.

"All Them Horses" sits at the intersection of that geographic devotion and the newer, harder question the album asks: what does it mean to belong to a place you can no longer fully inhabit? The song does not resolve that question. It holds it open.

It also functions as something rare in contemporary indie-folk: a direct, personal reckoning with climate disaster, told not from the perspective of policy or statistics but from the intimacy of someone who knows the particular farm, the particular river, the particular animals who were there.

Other Ways to Hear It

While the biographical context is specific, the song invites a broader reading. Horses in floods appear across visual culture as an image of catastrophic displacement, of natural grace overtaken by forces beyond its comprehension. Kahan's horses carry that symbolic weight whether the listener knows about the 2023 Vermont floods or not.

The guilt at the center of the song is also portable. Most people have experienced some version of it: the moment when you were somewhere else, pursuing your life, while something was happening at home that demanded witness. The song does not moralize. It does not suggest what the narrator should have done differently. It simply sits in the feeling, which is part of why it resonates beyond a strictly Vermont audience.

There is also an argument that the horses represent Vermont itself: a place known for its stubborn pastoral identity, its resilience, its resistance to certain kinds of modernity. If the horses face the flood without fear, it might not only be because they cannot understand it. It might also be read as a kind of strength native to the place, an endurance that neither requires nor awaits rescue.

What the Distance Teaches

"All Them Horses" arrives near the end of The Great Divide, which is the right placement.^[6] By the time the listener reaches it, the album has laid out its terrain of guilt, distance, and the wish to return to something irretrievable. The song does not offer resolution. It offers the thing Kahan has always been best at: the precise articulation of a feeling most people have had but could not name.

The flood is real. The horses were real. The guilt is real. And the act of writing the song, of making something careful and true from that guilt, is Kahan doing what he has always done with the hardest parts of his interior life: turning them into something that others can recognize in themselves.^[7] That is the oldest function of folk music, and one of its most enduring.