"Porch Light" is written from the perspective of Noah Kahan's mother, Lauri Berkenkamp, giving voice to the quiet, anxious love a parent carries while watching their child be consumed by fame.
I'll leave the porch light on
Heartbroken, each morning when it's me that turns it off
Rather than celebrating her son's success with his 2022 breakthrough Stick Season album, Kahan's mother is pleading for him to come home. The porch light left on is a symbol of unconditional welcome.
Kahan has spent years name-checking his Vermont upbringing and the people in it with the kind of detail that makes relatives both proud and mildly nervous. According to the official press notes, "Porch Light" was inspired by "the emotional weight Kahan believes he placed on his family by opening up their lives throughout his creative narrative and lyrical storytelling on Stick Season."
Lauri Berkenkamp is a published author (parenting guides and children's books) and when Noah wrote this song she was the director of integrated communications at Dartmouth College. She attended the 2024 Grammy Awards with Kahan when he was nominated for Best New Artist, and said on the Live from E! red carpet: "Well, I cried three times in the car over. I'm trying really hard not to cry."
Noah Kahan co-wrote "Porch Light" with Aaron Dessner of The National in their first co-writing session together. Kahan and Dessner produced the song with Gabe Simon, Kahan's longtime collaborator who also produced Stick Season. Gabe Simon has also worked with Dua Lipa, Lana Del Rey, and Koe Wetzel.
The recording was split between Dessner's Long Pond Studio in upstate New York and a Nashville session hub, giving the track that now-familiar Kahan blend of indie hush and campfire confession.
"Porch Light" was released on March 13, 2026, via Mercury Records/UMG as the second single from
The Great Divide album, following
the title track. Thematically it deepens the album's central concern; the emotional distances created between Kahan and the people closest to him as his life changed after
Stick Season. "The Great Divide" addresses a lost childhood friend, while "Porch Light" brings that reckoning home to family, completing a picture of guilt, love, and the cost of public storytelling.
Kahan first previewed "Porch Light" live as an unreleased track at the Out of the Blue Festival in Cancún, Mexico, on January 6, 2025, 14 months before its studio release. It appeared on the same festival setlist as other then-unreleased The Great Divide tracks, including the title song.
"Porch Light" grew out of Kahan's fear that those closest to him would think he's grown too big for his boots. "I always worried that my mom felt or my family felt like I wasn't myself anymore and that I was just some ghoul that would come in to extrapolate further success or further emotion for my own gain," he told Apple Music. "The truth is my mom never felt that way. She always felt she always showed me love and showed me patience and understood the gravity of what I was going through. I wanted that hope to be in there, like, 'I'll leave the porch light on for you.'"
Speaking to Rolling Stone, Noah Kahan recalled arriving at producer Aaron Dessner's Long Pond studio in upstate New York in late 2024 feeling creatively exhausted. Surrounded by the studio's cozy, wooded atmosphere - the same retreat-like environment where Dessner has helped shape records by Taylor Swift and The National - Kahan admitted he wasn't even sure he still had songs left to write. "I've just been so burnt out and kind of lost," he told Dessner, expecting more of a low-pressure hangout than a breakthrough writing session.
Instead, within an hour, Kahan had written "Porch Light." "It felt instantaneous in that way - this river of ideas," he said.
"Porch Light" was transformed dramatically once Kahan's touring member Dylan Jones added its banjo part. What began as a melancholy folk ballad suddenly took on an unexpected sense of release and momentum.
"When Dylan played that banjo part, I was like, 'This is like a dance track,'"
Gabe Simon recalled to Billboard. "We went from having this really cool folk song to our fists were in the air and we were jumping up and down in the studio."
The swelling banjo and fiddle passages at the song's climax became that release valve, a musical payoff that reframes the sorrow of the verses with a sense of resilience and forward motion. "You get to the end of the song and you feel rewarded by this banjo part," Simon explained, "and there's a fiddle part that is this little bit of joy, a little bit of hope that kind of knows it's going to be okay."
Simon recalled hearing the finished track performed publicly for the first time at Santa's Pub in Nashville, where Noah Kahan unexpectedly played it during an appearance with Ed Sheeran. Although Simon had already heard an early version, the full performance hit differently in a live setting.
"I got cold chills when I heard the full thing," he said. "I looked over to Drew and I was like, 'This song is unbelievable.'"
According to Simon, even Sheeran was stunned by the performance. "Ed Sheeran was speechless after he played it. It was such a cool moment."
