Jonah Kagen

Savannah to the road

Jonah Kagen was born in Savannah, Georgia, on 10 January 2000, and has been releasing music under his own name since 2021, all of it through Arista Records. The early biography is thin on the public record, and he has kept it that way. What he has said, in a question-and-answer piece published on the day his debut album came out, is that he signed his record deal while still at college, then spent nine months in Los Angeles, a stretch in Nashville and a period in Miami before deciding that none of them was where the songs were.

The influences he names are telling. He credits the fingerstyle guitarist Andy McKee as his biggest sonic influence, the player who taught him the fundamentals of the instrument, and points to Adrianne Lenker and Jason Isbell for the way he writes lyrics. That combination, a percussive acoustic technique underneath plain-spoken storytelling, is the through-line from his first EPs to the present.

Those EPs came quickly. Georgia Got Colder arrived in 2022, Made Up My Mind in 2023, and the single 'The Roads', released in 2023, gave him a first chart entry when it reached number 24 on the US Alternative airplay listing. By 2024 he was touring Europe for the first time, supporting Chance Peña, and had played the Austin City Limits festival for the first time.

A year in a trailer

In mid-2024 Kagen announced that he would spend a year travelling the United States in an Airstream trailer, partly to get closer to the people listening and partly to make discomfort do some work. The trailer became both his home and his studio. The route ran roughly from South Carolina to Montana, and everything he recorded in that period was written, played and produced by him alone.

The first result was the Black Dress EP, released in November 2024 and recorded entirely inside the Airstream. Kagen has been candid about how awkward that was: outside noise, weather and power all got in the way, and he has said that each of those problems either forced him to try something new or handed him a story to write about. The EP's opening track, 'God Needs the Devil', supplied the record's title from its own imagery and would become the song that changed his career.

The full album followed on 5 September 2025. Sunflowers and Leather runs to sixteen tracks, every one written and produced by Kagen, with Sam Barber appearing on 'Burn Me'. Speaking to Holler in October 2025, he described the songs as a few of the many stories he had accrued on the road, along with a good number picked up from other people. His stated aim for the whole thing was modest: to mean what he said and see what happened. A documentary shot along the route was released alongside it, and within weeks of the album landing he told The Luna Collective that his monthly Spotify listeners had nearly doubled since July.

The song that went to number one

'God Needs the Devil' did what the earlier singles had not. It climbed radio formats through the winter and topped the Billboard Alternative Airplay chart in May 2025, and it also charted at number 22 on the Adult Alternative listing and number 30 on the Rock airplay chart. At a show in Washington DC on 5 February 2026 it was noted from the stage that the song had been certified gold the day before. 'You Again', the album's lead single, reached number 37 on the Adult Alternative chart in 2025.

The commercial picture caught up in a hurry. When Pollstar reported on his 2026 headline tour in October 2025, it put his streaming total at more than 500 million and his monthly Spotify audience above six million, and noted that a headline show at the Top Hat Lounge in Missoula, Montana on 16 July 2025 had sold 478 tickets. His bookings that autumn were as a support act, first with Vance Joy earlier in 2025 and then, in October, on a run of sold-out dates with Cameron Whitcomb, alongside a slot at the Redwest Country Music Festival. He is represented by Wasserman Music.

Where he stands now

Kagen headlined at proper scale for the first time between 20 January and 28 March 2026. The Sunflowers & Leather Tour was a thirty-two date run of clubs and mid-sized theatres, opening at Hi Fi in Indianapolis and closing at Antone's in Austin, taking in Thalia Hall in Chicago, the Bowery Ballroom in New York, the Basement East in Nashville, The Crocodile in Seattle and two nights at the Troubadour in West Hollywood on 9 and 10 March.

Since then the story has moved fast. On 26 March 2026 Dermot Kennedy announced his autumn North American run, The Weight of the Woods Tour, with Kagen as support on most dates and Hunter Metts at selected shows. It started on 4 September in Minneapolis and ends on 29 October in Vancouver, with a Red Rocks date on 17 October. The stops include Saint Louis Music Park on 9 September, Huntington Bank Pavilion in Chicago on 11 September and the Michigan Lottery Amphitheatre in Sterling Heights on 12 September. Kagen has folded in dates of his own around the run, including the Borderland Festival in East Aurora, New York on 20 September, a show in Wilmington, North Carolina on 2 October and Pappy and Harriet's in Pioneertown, California on 23 October.

Then, on 28 August 2026, he announced a second album. Eternity of Anything is due on 30 October through Arista, and its first single, 'Don't Feel Right', came out the same day with a video directed by Olivia Bee. The track was written and produced by Kagen, with Rob Lowman on cello and his touring drummer Dalton Thomas. He has framed the record as the opposite of the first: where Sunflowers and Leather was made while moving and writing down what happened, this time he stopped moving and had to pull the songs out of himself. The subject, in his words, is being intimidated by the size of love, its beginning, its ending and its absence, and he has said the record is dramatic on purpose while also making fun of its own drama. Of the single he has said that it keeps the songwriting bones people know from him, but the production is darker, dirtier and more adventurous.

The show today

What is on sale at the moment is mostly the Kennedy run, so a ticket buys a support set in an amphitheatre rather than the full headline show Kagen was playing in the spring. The shape of that headline show is well documented, though, and it is the best guide to what his own October dates will look like.

Kagen tours with a three-piece: Sam Johnston on guitar and mandolin, Jefferson Rinck on bass and Dalton Thomas on drums. Across twenty-two logged 2026 shows the set settled at fourteen songs, opening with 'Simon' and 'The Reaper', running through 'Candy Land', 'You Again', 'Matches', 'Black Lung', 'Anvil', 'Same Wind', 'The Roads', 'Talkin' About Jesus', 'Save My Soul' and 'God Needs the Devil', closing the main set with 'Burn Me' and returning for 'Sunflowers and Leather' as the encore.

Parklife DC's review of the 5 February 2026 show at The Atlantis in Washington, a 450-capacity room that was full, describes a fifteen-song night with Anna Graves opening solo and premiering a new song, 'Ashes & Smoke'. Midway through, the band pulled chairs to the front of the stage for 'Black Lung' and played it as a fireside circle. Kagen talked a great deal between songs, telling one story about camping in a couple's garden while their daughter picked up his less printable lyrics, and running a recurring bit in which he scolded Rinck for slipping goofy riffs into serious moments, to which Rinck read out a prepared reply. He introduced 'Candy Land' as the happiest sounding song in the set and also a very upsetting one. The reviewer heard a hush during the quiet passages and a roar at the loud ones, and predicted he would outgrow rooms of that size soon. Given that he now walks out in front of Dermot Kennedy's crowds most nights, that prediction is already being tested.