Noah Kahan has long joked that he’s the “Jewish Ed Sheeran.” And this week, the two singer-songwriters finally got together, playing a set of acoustic songs — including one of the British pop star’s unreleased tracks titled “Old Phone” — in a Nashville pub.
In one video posted to Instagram by the “Shape of You” singer Tuesday (April 22), he and the Vermont native sit across from each other on the intimate barroom floor of Santa’s Pub in Tennessee’s capital, both of them wielding acoustic guitars. Smiling, Sheeran and Kahan belt out the chorus to the latter’s breakthrough 2022 smash “Stick Season.”
“I love Vermont, but it’s the season of the sticks/ And I saw your mom, she forgot that I existed,” they belt, joined by dozens of fans seated around them. “And it’s half my fault, but I just like to play the victim/ I’ll drink alcohol ’til my friends come home for Christmas.”
“Shut down @santaspub in Nashville to do dueling songs with @noahkahanmusic,” Sheeran captioned the performance. “What a night.”
According to other clips posted by guests in attendance, the pair also sang “All My Love” and “Dial Drunk” from Kahan’s Billboard 200 No. 2 album Stick Season. Sheeran also enlisted the folk singer to perform the unreleased “Old Phone,” remarking, “I recorded this song, I was like, ‘I think it kind of sounds like a Noah Kahan song … this is a like a full-circle moment for me.”
“That’s f–king mind-blowing,” Kahan quipped.
“Conversations with my dead friends/ Messages from all my exes,” Sheeran then sang on the track, which he previously performed on The Tonight Show ahead of its May 2 release, as Kahan joined him on guitar. “I kinda think that this was best left/ There, in the past, where it belongs.”
The performance marks just the latest pub pop-up the “Perfect” musician has hosted ahead of his upcoming album, Play, with Sheeran also making headlines for his surprise mini concerts at other bars in Boston and Nashville this year. On that note, Sheeran also built a fully functional bar called the Old Phone Pub in Ipswich, Mass., to promote his new song “Azizam,” which debuted at No. 28 on the Billboard Hot 100 in April. Shortly afterward, he reconstructed the pop-up at Coachella, where he sang duets with Shaboozey and Alex Warren in addition to performing on the Mojave stage at the festival.
Watch Sheeran and Kahan perform “Old Phone” and “Stick Season” below.
