The Great Divide , Kahan's fourth album, is a prodigal son fable, with a central character who destabilizes the spaces he once called home. Patrick McCormack hide caption

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Patrick McCormack

"What right did I have to be so strange?" wonders Jack, the faded antihero of Marilynne Robinson's 2008 novel Home , reflecting on a life spent first trashing and then running from the semi-rural comforts that are his inheritance. Jack is a problem child grown into alcoholic instability, the prodigal son in Home 's recasting of that story from Luke's gospel within the gentle, stifling atmosphere of the mid-20th century American Midwest.…