Ed Sheeran, Noah Kahan play intimate concert at a Nashville dive bar

USA Today

23-04-2025

Ed Sheeran, Noah Kahan play intimate concert at a Nashville dive bar
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Ed Sheeran, Noah Kahan perform impromptu set at Nashville's Santa's Pub
Nashville-favored global folk-pop stars Ed Sheeran, Noah Kahan performed an impromptu private set at Nashville's Santa's Pub on April 22, 2025.
Folk-pop superstars Noah Kahan and Ed Sheeran played a show for an unusually small crowd on April 22. In a surprise team-up, the pair performed for about 100 people at a dive bar.
Sheeran, who has sold about 200 million singles in the past dozen years, joined Kahan, his friend of the past seven years, for a set that included hits like "Dial Drunk" and "Stick Season."
"We're going to play songs until someone gives up," said Sheeran as the impromptu, but invite-only event began at Santa's Pub in Nashville, Tennessee. "It's going to feel like a freestyle battle for depressed people," Kahan joked. "I'm the Jewish Ed Sheeran."
"I'm the Catholic Noah Kahan," Sheeran quipped.
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Inside Noah Kahan, Ed Sheeran's intimate Santa's Pub performance
Santa's Pub is the kind of cash-only, single-serve cans or bottles, no-liquor-available type of dive bar, that's rare in areas near downtown Nashville of late. It's where $100 can buy a drink for everyone living on a nearby neighborhood block.
By tradition's standards, this wasn't exactly country music. It was "Cheers," but the whole world — and not just bar patrons — knew the names of two people occasionally stomping their feet on the floor for rhythmic emphasis, but primarily, rather quietly, playing some of the saddest, most healing songs of the past decade on their guitars.
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Ed Sheeran's joyous, bar and festival-hopping world tour
Sheeran is preparing to drop a new album entitled "Play," which he largely recorded with a dozen musicians in Goa, on India's southwestern coast. No release date has been revealed.
As part of the promotion, he's bar-hopped across the country for small shows in cities including Boston, Los Angeles, and New York as well as a headlining set at Coachella.
Stops have seen him appear with everyone from Megan Moroney and songwriter Amy Allen in Nashville, to Post Malone, Shaboozey and pop star Alex Warren at Coachella. Not content with that, he's also performed for pink-hatted bachelorettes at Tootsie's in Nashville's Lower Broadway neighborhood.
In this cycle of his career, sitting across from Kahan and providing a bittersweet paradise by the dive bar neon lights is par for the course.
"Even outside of playing at the Ryman or somewhere, these crowds make four-part harmonies (feel almost) automatic when you perform in Nashville," Sheeran whispered to Kahan after playing the first verse and chorus of his breakout hit "The A Team."
"Yeah, man, Belmont students are all like, 'My moment is right now,'" joked Kahan in response.
Kahan and Sheeran, the perfect pair
Kahan is a superfan of Sheeran as much as he is a friend.
As he performed several songs, which he described as chronicling a troubled relationship with his father, the clearness of a star able to tap into and concisely express his soul's rawest potency became clear. Sheeran also has that quality in spades.
As Sheeran performed the decade-old "I'm A Mess," Kahan gazed on, stunned that he wrote the song while standing in a spare shower in his home with superb acoustics.
"You're... lathering yourself to that — I can't take a shower anymore," he joked.
When Kahan sang a new song, "Porchlight," which again dips into fraught family dynamics, Sheeran smiled, occasionally strumming along as a backing player.
Over the past dozen years, notably during a nine-month stint in 2013 when he lived in Nashville, Sheeran has drunk many a night away at Santa's Pub. Thus, more than any festival or stadium stage, it's where he felt it appropriate to create an evening that was equal parts a night at a Scottish pub and a melding of two super-star talents.
Sheeran and Kahan kicked back bottles of Modelo and played A-sides, B-sides and new material, clearly enjoying themselves, the crowd and each others company most of all.