COVER STORY | The Wild, Wonderful Year of Noah Kahan

It’s 2023, and you’ve surely heard of Noah Kahan by now. The 26-year-old singer/songwriter was born in Vermont, grew up in New Hampshire and was roving around Massachusetts soon after. He is a New Englander to his core, and you can hear that in every note of his work—especially on his breakthrough album Stick Season, which first arrived in October 2022 and has, in the 14 months since, become a global folk music phenomenon. Listeners have likened Kahan’s sonic vocabulary to that of The Lumineers and Mumford & Sons—artists he has long-cited as crucial influences—and the stomp-clap revival of the early 2010s. But, when it comes down to it, Kahan’s tunes reflect the type of indie DNA you might find across records from Phoebe Bridgers and Bon Iver, artists who have helped transform contemporary approaches to lyricism with painstakingly crystalline imagery and themes. He also pulls heavily from the writing style of John Steinbeck in East of Eden and his description of California’s Salinas Valley. For Kahan, it’s not so much about capturing a moment in his songs; it’s about capturing a lifetime and being intentional when describing the places he’s been and the days he’s made it through.

I interviewed Kahan for the first time back in July, on the heels of the deluxe-edition release of Stick Season and the mounting success of “Dial Drunk,” which, in around 30 days, had already racked up 37-million streams. Now, in December, it’s knocking on the doorstep of 100-million. His reimagined version of the song with Post Malone has already crossed the threshold of 122-million streams. It’s safe to say that, emphatically, few artists are bigger right now than Noah Kahan. When we first spoke, he was holed up at his dad’s house in-between tour legs, doing chores and attempting to assimilate (albeit briefly) back into hometown life. This time around, he’s in a green room at the O2 Forum Kentish Town in London, taking puffs of oxygen in-between answers before his 9 PM set.

The lifespan of Stick Season never ceases, or at least that’s the mantra alive and well in Kahan’s continued celebration of the record. In July, he kicked off a series of reimagined songs from the album with Post Malone. In the months since, he’s put out tracks with Lizzy McAlpine (“Call Your Mom”), Kacey Musgraves (“She Calls Me Back”), Hozier (“Northern Attitude”) and, most recently, Gracie Abrams (“Everywhere, Everything”). While these re-imaginings are, in part, a product of Kahan not yet having enough time to pen new material, they are more so a fixture of him showing the lives these songs have yet to live. It’s forward momentum, sure, but these releases don’t feel like calculated streaming boosts. It feels, genuinely, like Kahan wants to continue transforming what his work could—and should—sound like.

“I’ve been touring pretty much non-stop for a year,” he says. “And, as I’m playing these songs every night, I want to feel new life in them. And you can only do that so much on your own, so I’ve brought in an amazing group of musicians and artists—who have been interested in collaborating on them—to come and bring their own style to the songs and bring new life to them in a way that’s really fun for me. To watch Kacey Musgraves bring her own feel into it, to see Hozier bring his own feel to it, to watch Post bring his own story to it, as well, was really exciting. It allows me to see the songs in a new light, as I play them on the road night after night for another year.”

The story of how Post Malone came to appear on “Dial Drunk” involved Kahan DM’ing him on Instagram and then, a few months later, the multi-genre phenom reached back out. Kahan met Abrams at the Eras Tour in the “tent where they put famous people, or whatever, and I got put in the tent. Snuck in, somehow.” He’d been a fan of hers for a long time and had especially been excited about seeing her story grow and, as a fellow New Englander, was awestruck at the path she’s taken thus far. “She cut this amazing vocal on ‘Everywhere, Everything’ and Aaron Dessner [of the National] is shredding the guitar in the background,” Kahan says. “She’s just a fucking beast and amazing singer and songwriter and a really tuned-in artist to the world of her music and her fanbase.” Abrams and Kahan’s rendition of “Everywhere, Everything” is already at 5-million streams, and the track has only been out—at the time of this article’s publication—one week.

Kahan met Hozier at Iron Blossom Music Festival in August and joined him onstage for a rendition of “Work Song” and, after hanging out and sharing the stage again in Nashville a few weeks later, came together to record a new sequence for “Northern Altitude.” Each collaborator came in with an idea of what song they wanted to work on, and Musgraves was especially very adamant about performing “She Calls Me Back.” Kahan, inevitably, gave each of his peers full mobility and asked them to take the compositions in whichever direction felt right. “That was really cool, to get that stamp of approval on the music,” he says, “but also say ‘Hey, you have carte blanche. Make whatever you want. If you want to change the lyrics, please do that. If you want to add in your own production style, please do that.’ It was really cool, just letting artists lead the way. You know, I’m not gonna stand in the way of some of my favorite artists in the world and how they want to sing my songs. Definitely not.”

The Hozier link-up feels particularly fitting. Some users online have pointed out that, lyrically, the two musicians share a common DNA of vivid storytelling—though, yes, their individual styles and themes differ greatly. I see the thread between Kahan and Hozier, though, most especially in how they are able to reach people with their work. If you’ve seen either artist take the stage, you’re probably well-aware of just how defiantly transcendent their performative craftsmanship is. They take great care of the people who come to shows; every night is treated like a once-in-a-lifetime two hours. Kahan cites Hozier’s “Cherry Wine” as a talismanic guiding light for his own storytelling.

“That song, talking about domestic violence through this faux love song, it’s really interesting to me,” he says. “Trojan-horsing songs, where you present it as a beautiful, heartfelt love song that’s really about some tricky stuff. That’s something I really tried to do on Stick Season. A song like ‘Orange Juice,’ that, to me, feels really sweet—a syrupy song about seeing someone again, and it turns into this tune about alcoholism and a traumatic car crash and gets into this storytelling that’s kind of dark. You use that production tyle or that delivery or that music as a vehicle for a more important conversation, and I really think that Hozier does that in an amazing way.”

The process for these recordings doesn’t include much studio time. While Kahan is on the phone or on FaceTime with his collaborators, the meat of the deal comes from him sending the musicians stems of the songs and letting them experiment however they please. Largely, it’s a remote process—which fully makes sense, given that Kahan is never in one place for longer than a night or two at a time. “It’s cool to be able to let them have that freedom to be in their own space and in their own studios, with their own producer, and make that happen their own way,” he adds.

It’s one thing when listeners and fans—the people who are in the front row of a show on any given night—hold your songs and lyrics close, but it’s a whole new ballgame when your heroes think just the same. And Post Malone, Hozier, Musgraves, Abrams and McAlpine’s interest in Kahan’s work has only made him more confident and comfortable with having Stick Season continue to live and mature. And with how rigorous and demanding the music industry is—especially when it comes to output and visibility—it’s his way of making sure that the work he’s releasing is cared for. “These collaborations have all happened months and months after the record came out, so it’s been really cool to be like, ‘Okay, I’m glad to give it that space,’” Kahan says. “I think if we had put out a bunch of new music and tried to force another record out before this last tour, then you might not have these collaborations. You might not have these seals of approval and you might not let the right people find it. I’m not sure when all these people heard these songs, but I don’t know if it was right when it was released.”

“It’s cool that this album has had the time to mature and to let people find it and to let some of these artists that I love be on it—like so many other things in my life right now that I’m so fucking grateful for,” he continues. “I also have a really hard time processing hearing Hozier’s voice on it or any of these collabs here. Posty’s verse always blows my mind. It’s hard to process, but incredibly cool. It’s something that I think, when I’m done touring this record, when I’m making my next thing, I can look back and be like, ‘That was fucking awesome.’ I’m glad I’m getting a chance to do all these amazing things on this record, because it’s something I’m really proud of. It’s fun to be able to know that I’ll be able to look back and be proud that I did everything I could do for it.”

For now, what comes next for Kahan’s catalog is uncertain. The focus is on his upcoming We’ll All Be Here Forever Tour of North America in 2024, where he’ll be hitting nearly 40 cities from March through July. Many of those shows are sold out, nearly all of them (at the time of this article) are under low ticket warnings. But, when Kahan does pick up his pen again for his Stick Season follow-up, the potential of opening up that record to collaborators like he has with this recent batch of singles is fully on the table. “I think it’d be fun to do that,” he says. “Stick Season, I kept originally without features because the album itself was so specific to where I was from and into my life up to that point that I didn’t really want to share that with anybody—at least in the initial rollout, I wanted people to digest what I was saying about myself, about my childhood, about my life. But, if the next record isn’t something like that, I would love to do some features on it.”

While folk music hasn’t had a breakout star like Kahan in over a decade, it’s hard to miss how he’s amassed such a tough-as-nails resume in such a short time. Listeners are holding a lot of resonance for his work. Listen to Stick Season or watch footage of one of his gigs and it’ll become obvious that none of this ever feels transactional. Even during our interview right before taking the stage in England, Kahan is receptive and vocally grateful to share this space with me. Few musicians who are on his level of stardom are as openly kind to writers or as equally generous with their time—especially when these conversations are happening outside of key press cycles. Love Noah Kahan or hate Noah Kahan, it’s impossible to argue that the world of music doesn’t need somebody like him right now.

And as Stick Season continues to become even more massive, Kahan remains humble through it all—which is refreshing, given that watching singer/songwriters turn into stars can be a laborious, disheartening endeavor, as our heroes become, all too often, bigger than the folks who’ve ridden for them forever. Kahan is unlike many of our current musical superstars. He’s unafraid of being chronically online, publicly talking about his lifelong relationship with therapy or admitting that, during a show earlier this year, he shit his pants. The TikTok stitch to Taylor Swift VIP tent pipeline is alive and well in the microcosm of Noah Kahan’s world, and he’s eating every speck of it up. When he takes the stage, he tries to find new things in each song in each crowd that excites him—as he actively works against falling into the trap of the “I’ve played this song 100 times in the past two weeks” mantra. And it starts with him just opening his eyes and paying attention:

“During a certain part of a song, I’ll look out and see how people are reacting to it,” Kahan says. “Their reaction always reinvigorates me, makes me remember—even for myself—what that song is saying and how it does mean something to them and it meant something to me. It still means something to me. And I think it’s really a matter of constantly making an effort to remember how I felt when I wrote these tunes and remembering how fucking lucky I am that people are still singing them and still responding to them and getting to hear them for the first time live. To watch people celebrate the themes and celebrate their ability to sing the themes of the songs live is really cool. Watching a bunch of people sing about their parents’ divorce is fucking awesome—and that reinvigorates my love for what I’m doing and gives me reasons to do it ever night. So, I always try to find myself every night to be out there, and I haven’t missed one so far.”

As Kahan and I have our conversation, Stick Season on the East Coast is nearly over. The snow is on the horizon—and has likely already arrived in some places. It’s the period of time, usually, between Halloween and Thanksgiving, a small sliver of the year where autumn is making its final rounds before winter and the leaves have abandoned their branches. That phrase—“Stick Season”—has now become such a synonymous part of Kahan’s life that, at times, what it was two, three years ago—when he was first sketching the album—gets lost. “Hundreds of times a fucking day I’m seeing ‘Stick Season,’” he explains. “It is hard for me to remember its original meaning. But, when I go home, I’m like, ‘Yeah, this is it. It’s fucking miserable, the trees have no leaves.’ It’s still there, and I think that’s what’s cool about it—it’s like a play into the album itself. Vermont and Stick Season will always be there no matter how many albums I make about it. It’s the feeling of your hometown persisting through any kind of change. The more my life changes with [Stick Season], it’s still the same experience at home for me. It feels very grounding.”

But the biggest thing to happen to Kahan in the time between our two conversations was, of course, that he was nominated for Best New Artist at the 2024 Grammy Awards—alongside Abrams, Ice Spice, Victoria Monét and Jelly Roll, among others. If you’ve been tuned in at all to Kahan’s meteoric rise to contemporary fame, the nomination came, likely, as no real surprise. I mean, besides boygenius, such few artists who are even remotely adjacent to the indie world have been talked about more since the last Grammys ceremony. Kahan admits that his team has had the Grammys penciled off in his schedule for a long time, and getting a nomination has been a dream of his since he was a little kid. “I literally was practicing my Grammy speech in bed before I fell asleep,” he says. “I always wanted it. I don’t find myself as the kind of person that needs the merit of some academy telling me that I did a good job but, for some reason, the Grammys was always something that I really fucking wanted. This was something that I’ve always endeavored for.”

The opportunity for Kahan to get some Grammy recognition for Stick Season was running thin by this November. The album’s initial release didn’t garner any love at the ceremony earlier this year, but Best New Artist was immediately on the table after the 2023 he’s had—especially since the Academy has never been super strict on what exactly constitutes a Best New Artist nomination (Japanese Breakfast scored a nomination in 2022 after already releasing three solo albums after playing in Little Big League for five years prior to that). The momentum of Stick Season and his massive touring successes paved a pretty straight-forward path to the promised land—and he made it. Though, he was pretty superstitious leading up to it.

“I made a rule where I literally wouldn’t let anybody in my life talk about it,” Kahan says. “My mom would start talking about it and I’d be like, ‘We don’t talk about the Grammys.’ Anybody that wanted to talk to me about it, we would not fucking talk about it at all. So, it became really hard. The weeks leading up, we were looking at articles and they’re like, ‘Noah Kahan is predicted to be in this conversation’ and it got harder and harder for me to push out these feelings of maybe I’ll get excited—because I knew I would be so sad if I did it and I let myself think that I could.”

When nomination day rolled around on November 10th, Kahan locked himself up in a room alone to watch the ceremony—and he chose to record himself, win or lose. “I went in with hope, but also a resigned feeling of ‘This is probably not going to happen,’” he says. “I was able to maintain ‘This isn’t going to happen’ for a whole year so, when my name did drop, it felt like a complete surprise to me. It felt like a complete miracle.” Later that night, Kahan had a show and he blew his voice out from screaming in the green room. He’d finally seized the moment his younger self had wanted so deeply. The work had paid off.

“When I was a little kid, I always said, ‘I’m going to win a Grammy, I’m going to do something great in my life,’” he adds. “And then, I went through so much of my career just being beat down by reality. The voice in my head was like, ‘Just stay at your job, you’re not gonna be great but you’ll be a musician. That’s fine.’ So when I got a Grammy nom, it felt like I woke back up to that dream I had as a kid, and that was really cool—to wake back up in that moment and be like, ‘Yes! I was right. I knew that I had something good and I knew that I could do this and that I have talent.’ It was an affirming feeling. I feel like I can convince myself that I’m useless so easily. I haven’t been able to pat myself on the back much in my life, and I was able to pat myself on the back for this.”

I ask Kahan who, if he wins Best New Artist in February, will be the first person he thanks on stage when he’s handed the gold gramophone. His answer is predictably perfect: “My mom, straight up. My mom is just the most important part of my whole success story. [She] drove me to open mics that I know she didn’t want to be at on nights after she worked all fucking day; drove me to America’s Got Talent in Providence, Rhode Island. Yeah, my mom.”

Just days after our conversation, Kahan is scheduled to be the musical guest on Saturday Night Live. Emma Stone will host and pick up her 5-Timer’s Club jacket, too. When word got out that he was going to be at 30 Rockefeller Center in December, Kahan shared a tweet from 2021 he made. “I wanna perform on SNL,” he wrote. I don’t even care if it’s an off-brand version called Sunday Night Live just get me on the show I’ll do anything.” Nearly everyone who has ever enjoyed—or loved—Saturday Night Live has that moment where, for them, the whole show finally clicked, be it a skit or a musical guest or a host, you name it. For Kahan, it was seeing Maggie Rogers play on the show in 2018. “She was having such an incredible year,” he says. “Watching her do ‘Fallingwater’ on SNL, you could just see this was her making it. We’ll see if that’s the case for me. I feel like people are like, ‘Who the fuck is this guy?’ But, I’m gonna do my best to show that I deserve the spot.”

While Stone’s belovedness is no secret, Kahan is quick to point out that she is in one of his favorite films of all time, The Rocker. “I don’t know if she’s proud of [it] or not, but I think it’s an amazing movie,” he says. “I felt like it didn’t get marketed a lot, and no one ever really talked about it. But I fucking love that movie. Dwight from The Office [Rainn Wilson] is in it, Teddy Geiger is in it. I love Emma Stone, I think she is just an incredible actor. She’s so funny, so smart and so talented. She can do any role, dramatic or comedic. I would love to get a skit, I’m trying to put pressure on them to let me be in a skit.” While Kahan didn’t make it into a skit that night, he and his band did deliver pretty good renditions of “Dial Drunk” and “Stick Season.” I’d say it was a successful outing.

Throughout Kahan’s never-ending press run for Stick Season, I’ve found the lack of questions about the two German Shepherds on the album’s cover to be disheartening. Naturally, I get to the bottom of it. “My mom got a dog named Oma from our neighbor,” Kahan says. “And, when I went to pick up Oma, there was another little dog in there named Big Bertha, or something. I couldn’t walk away without picking up this dog and getting it, because it was the last one and I’m just a fucking impulsive idiot. So, I grabbed this dog.” Oma is the pup holding a stick in her mouth and running towards, while Kahan’s dog—who he has since renamed Penny—is sitting next to him looking dashingly well-mannered. The cover photo was snapped in his mom’s yard, where he wrote most of Stick Season, and Penny now travels with Kahan everywhere. “She’s my best friend, she is a lovely dog,” he says. “And she is famous as hell. She’s been on billboards in Times Square and she has no idea. It’s great.”

Between the overarching narrative of mental health, relationships, hometown complexities and homesickness, Stick Season is so definitively New England—but it also definitively captures a portrait of small-town America in ways that so many folks resonate with. I myself came from a town of 3,000 people, a place I couldn’t wait to get out of when I was old enough and, over the years, have begun longing for more and more now that I’m gone. From a songwriter perspective, working through the nuances of complicated relationships with people and the places we come from and then, in a matter of a year, watching that art touch so many people, has been a roller coaster of emotions for Kahan.

“Sometimes it makes it weird to go home,” he says. “You feel like an alien or a tourist. You write about this place and, obviously, there’s so much hyperbole and exaggeration and fiction in the way I wrote about it. It all came from a real place, but the thing about small-town life is how boring it is—so you have to find a way to make that boredom entertaining. I think I looked at exaggerating the negatives and exaggerating the positives a little bit. So, when you come home and you realize that it’s, really, just somewhere in-between, you feel like you’ve intruded somehow and, maybe, painted a false picture. And, sometimes, it’s hard to go back and grapple with that. But people from my hometown are so supportive that, going home, it always feels like they’re so happy for me and excited for me and like they’re claiming me as one of their own and they claim the stories as their own. That’s been incredible. They’re selling my merch in the general store in town now.”

Stick Season was, no doubt, Kahan’s breakthrough. But what does having a “breakthrough” mean in 2023? Over the last two, three decades, the meaning around that idea has changed greatly. At some point, scoring a #1 hit meant you’d pierced through the barriers of stardom. Now, selling out tours, getting a “Best New Music” designation from Pitchfork and garnering a Grammy nomination can all signify a breakthrough. But, for Kahan, the clearest moment he can remember where it was obvious that the pre-Stick Season days were far behind him came during his set at Boston Calling in May.

“We went onstage and it was like, ‘Oh, whoa. Everyone at this festival seems to be here for our music, everyone knows every single word. People are claiming this as their truth about Boston, about New England,’” he explains. “I think, when you tap into a cultural feeling like that, it does extend beyond music. And it puts you in a place where people are listening to what you’re gonna say next. That show was the one where I realized people are really paying attention. After that, it felt like in The Rocker when they get famous as fuck. That’s how it felt, that immediate ‘Oh, my God, all these things are happening at once,’ stereotypical success-story stuff. That was the first moment where I felt like, ‘This is the start of something really special.’”

For Kahan, the momentum keeps going. In 2019, he tweeted out about how he was sure he’d never sell out Madison Square Garden. Fast-forward five years and he’ll be playing two consecutive sold-out nights there. I think that, as creatives, we have this tendency to limit our own aspirations and trick ourselves into thinking practically about what our own ceilings are. But, now that Kahan has done the thing that his 22-year-old self didn’t think was possible, it doesn’t change his mindset about what he will or will not accomplish as a musician.

“I like always being surprised by things happening,” he says. “I like to always feel like there’s no way so that, when it does happen—like with the Grammy nom—it was like, ‘Oh, my God.’ I like that feeling of being excited and surprised, and I never want to get used to or come to terms with the idea that dreams can come true like that. That’s why it’s fun to watch it happen. Thinking it isn’t real and then watching it become real is the most special thing in the world. And, if I just keep myself grounded and be happy with where I am, going up and going farther is always going to feel momentous instead of planned or expected.”

Most artists will put out a record, tour it for a year or a year-and-a-half (usually the former) and then head back into the studio and look onwards to what’s next. But, for Kahan, there’s something that’s keeping him on the road, a story within the Stick Season universe that hasn’t been told yet that he’s still chasing. “I think I’m trying to figure out how to stay in this world but move it forward,” he says. “I’m also thinking about how to provide the most amount of opportunity to my band and to the people that I love touring with. I think I’m trying to buy myself time for what’s next, really. I hate when I go home and I’m like, ‘Oh, man, now it’s time to start something new.’ I want to find that out on this journey, and these crazy adventures keep happening throughout this tour, throughout this last year, that I feel like, if I spend enough time here, something’s gonna happen that sparks the next thing—and I’m just waiting for it.”

Kahan has reached a level of popularity where, at any time during an interview, he can drop multiple references to The Rocker without really losing the plot of his own story. That’s a rewarding part to all of this, that, sometimes, you forget that you’re talking to one of the most talked-about musicians in North America whose name isn’t Taylor Swift. He’s no longer just an eight-year-old kid writing songs about boat journeying or playing “Father and Son” with his dad in nursing homes. Since August, he’s had five songs hit the Hot 100 chart, with “Sarah’s Place” (his collaboration with Zach Bryan) and “Dial Drunk” both cracking the Top 25. When Kahan and I first spoke, he was at 11-million monthly listeners on Spotify. Now, he’s nearly at 27-million. Who knows how high that number will skyrocket a year from now? It’s possible that he breaks into the Top 50 of the most-streamed artists by the end of 2024. I wouldn’t bet against it, that’s for sure.

In Glasgow a few days before our interview, Kahan played to the second largest crowd he ever had. The decibel level in the venue had reached 117, which is comparable to the sound of a jet engine. Thousands of people in Scotland were singing about the Boston Bombers and small-town Vermont, and that’s the kind of global songwriting sonority that happens to the folks who’ve earned it. Maybe you aren’t hip to Noah Kahan’s work, or maybe you wouldn’t even call yourself a fan. But what’s undeniable about everything he’s accomplished over the last 16 months is that of a modern triumph. “Maybe you’re in Missouri and you have a friend in Vermont,” he says. “If you’re in Scotland, you likely don’t know anyone that’s ever been to Vermont. It provides that motivation to keep being specific and to keep being real to myself—because it does actually connect with people everywhere in the world.”

Watch Noah Kahan perform at the Paste Studio in 2019 below.

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Matt Mitchell reports as Paste‘s music editor from their home in Columbus, Ohio.