In recent years, as TikTok has become an increasingly powerful engine for the dissemination of culture, a new sort of pop star has emerged: one who has enormous pull on social media but gets comparatively little acknowledgment from the music press, which remains laser-focussed on a handful of millennial superstars, so much so that the more conspiracy-minded among us have started whispering, “PsyOp.” Noah Kahan is one of those artists—everything to some, inscrutable to others, with striking numbers on Spotify and TikTok, and a steady presence on the Billboard chart since the release of “Stick Season,” his third album, in 2022. Kahan, who was nominated for a Grammy for Best New Artist this year, is the rare figure who seems positioned to leverage viral success into something more like a traditional career. “I knew there was potential for a moment to happen for me. I didn’t realize it would happen so quickly and in such a big way,” Kahan told me recently. He added, laughing, “I didn’t think it would be through viral success. I fucking hated social media. TikTok for me was just, like, What the fuck, dude? What am I gonna do here? I don’t get it.”
Kahan is from Strafford, Vermont, a town of around a thousand people. When we spoke, he was in the midst of playing a series of sold-out shows in Australia. Kahan often pulls his wavy brown hair into a low bun, and he has an affable, patient demeanor, as though in another life he would have been good at teaching toddlers how to ski, or home-brewing beer. His backing band and most of his gear had been waylaid by bad weather, so he was performing solo, on a rented guitar. The experience was nerve-racking. “I was rooted in place, stomach ache,” he said. “The crowd carried me through that moment.” Video from the first show, in Melbourne, started whipping around the Internet—twelve thousand rapt fans hollering along to every word. (Other viral stars have not been so fortunate. I remain haunted by a clip of the gifted singer-producer Steve Lacy, whose song “Bad Habit” was a TikTok sensation, trying and failing to get his audience to sing along with anything other than the hook.)
This month, Kahan released “Stick Season (Forever),” the third and final iteration of the album. (A deluxe version, titled “Stick Season (We’ll All Be Here Forever),” was released in 2023.) I told Kahan that the subtitles made me think of being young and feeling eternal. “My intention was to introduce this idea that you can never truly leave your home town,” he said. “Whether it’s physically or mentally, we still live in those places. When I wrote ‘Stick Season,’ I was home all the time, living through the positive and the negative of being in Vermont. When I released the album, I was touring all the time. I was singing about being stuck at home, but I was at some cool hotel in New York City. . . . ‘We’ll All Be Here Forever’ allows some grace for the person—I guess me, in this situation—who has left.” The new version of the album features duets with Post Malone, Kacey Musgraves, Hozier, Gracie Abrams, Sam Fender, Brandi Carlile, Lizzy McAlpine, and Gregory Alan Isakov. “I’ve definitely seen some fan responses, like, This motherfucker’s gonna keep releasing collabs? But I think the collaborations are really cool. I’m just doing what makes me happy.”
Kahan is sometimes lumped in with a subgenre of Americana music referred to, retroactively and derisively, as “stomp-clap-hey.” If you’ve heard the Lumineers’ “Ho Hey,” from 2012, you are familiar with both the sound (acoustic, shouty, urgent) and the general aesthetic (waxed mustaches, bowler hats, suspenders), jubilantly performed by bands with names (Mumford and Sons, Of Monsters and Men) that sound as though they might also be gastropubs. The genre enjoyed considerable commercial success; when Mumford and Sons’ second album, “Babel,” was released, it was the highest-selling U.S. début of the year. “Ho Hey” has been streamed more than a billion times on Spotify, just a little less than Rihanna’s “Diamonds,” an enormous hit from the same year. Still, the authenticity shtick eventually grew tiresome, and then sort of repellent. Kahan shares some musical DNA with those acts—furious vocal delivery, occasional banjo—but he is mostly uninterested in appearing as if he recently disembarked from a steamboat. He borrows more from contemporaries such as Taylor Swift (chatty, parasocial confessionalism) and Zach Bryan (wounded and seeking oblivion). Kahan’s earliest influences had broad appeal. “When I was really developing as a songwriter, I was listening to Jason Mraz and John Mayer, these guy-with-guitar dudes,” he said.
Kahan recently turned twenty-seven. On social media, he is charming and self-effacing about his extraordinary success. “The only thing me and the haters have in common is we’re both wondering how I am headlining festivals lmao,” he recently posted on X. Kahan first started writing music as a kid. He recalled performing a Cat Stevens song at a nursing home with his dad when he was seven or eight—a gig he described as a kind of consolation prize. “That’s where they send you when they don’t want you to play in the talent show at school,” he joked.
He was a listless student. “I was able to get decent grades, B’s, but I hated school,” he said. “I played soccer, but I was always so fuckin’ slow and no one passed to me. So I was, like, I’ll just play music. I’ll be the music guy. Then I really fell in love with being the music guy.” He began posting his songs online; when he was eighteen, Kahan deferred admission to Tulane University and signed a deal with Republic Records. He released a series of singles, which would later be included on “Busyhead” (2019), his début full-length album. On early tours, Kahan sometimes introduced himself as “the Jewish Ed Sheeran”—a good line, but also an apt description of his entire vibe. Kahan’s first few releases are lightly catchy indie pop—the sort of thing that might play at a reasonable volume while a dental hygienist scrapes gunk off your molars. In 2018, he performed his single “Hurt Somebody” on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” and a version with Julia Michaels later went gold in the U.S. The song is about the experience of trying to talk yourself out of breaking up with someone—theoretically rich terrain—but the lyrics (“It hurts when you hurt somebody”) lack the humor and the specificity that later became Kahan’s calling cards. In 2021, Kahan released a second album, “I Was / I Am,” which felt more personal. Its plucky single “Godlight” is a tense meditation on how someone can change: “Black heels in the summertime / Dirt road smoking on a Friday night / Honey, now you got a look that I don’t recognize,” Kahan sings.
But it wasn’t until “Stick Season” that Kahan finally found a sound—folksy, drunken, depraved, a little neurotic—that felt singular. He wrote the title track at an Airbnb in Los Angeles while he was in town for a recording session. “I was ordering gross amounts of tacos and eating a bunch of edibles, trying to do the TikTok thing,” he said. “If a song didn’t get a response right away, I would be so upset and so disappointed. Just such a servant to the applause.” The title track initially got little response. “I ate an edible after I finished editing the song, and then, by the time I posted it and I realized it wasn’t getting any likes or whatever, I was too high to delete it, so I fell asleep,” he said. He woke up the next morning to an avalanche of attention. The song opened something up for Kahan. “It’s very clearly about Vermont. It’s very clearly about transitions, and feeling stuck, or left behind. Suddenly, all these other songs I’d written came into view in a different way. That’s when I felt like I had an album.”
Kahan’s songs tend to unfold in the strange liminal space between late adolescence and adulthood, but they also nod to the strange liminal space that was 2020 through 2022, when it felt as though the only responsible choice was to stay tethered to one’s sofa, mired in a kind of arrested development (“Doc told me to travel, but there’s Covid on the planes,” Kahan sings on “Stick Season”). His best lyrics are clever, earnest, and suffused with vague yearning—a nudging sense that, as Bruce Springsteen once sang, not without a little despair, “There’s something happening somewhere.”
“Stick season” is a phrase used in Vermont to describe the rotten stretch after peak autumn foliage and before the first snow. “Fall is beautiful, and then the leaves fall off the trees and it stinks,” Kahan said, in 2022. But his New England origins have led to opportunities. He’s curated a collection for L. L. Bean that includes a plaid wool shirt and a reversible field coat for dogs; worked with a craft brewery based in Stratford, Connecticut, on a bespoke I.P.A. with a “piney and resinous” flavor profile; and collaborated with Ranger Station, a company that makes hand-poured candles in reusable cocktail glasses. Kahan’s candle, which sells for forty-five dollars, is said to evoke “misty woods, crisp pine trees and bittersweet hometown nostalgia.”
Sometimes it seems as if Kahan is leaning into the bit. Yet there’s an entire canon of nineteenth-century poetry, from Thoreau and Longfellow to Whitman and Dickinson, dedicated to the grim, spartan lonesomeness of late fall and winter in the Northeast. “Forgive my northern attitude,” Kahan sings on “Northern Attitude,” a song about geographic and emotional desolation. “Oh, I was raised out in the cold.” He reiterates the idea on “Homesick,” an extremely funny song about the spiritual stagnation of small-town life: “I would leave if only I could find a reason / I’m mean because I grew up in New England.” (That couplet always reminds me of certain Ben Affleck memes, in which the actor is pictured clutching Dunkin’ Donuts coffee, his face twisted in the existential anguish that comes from trudging over one too many gray snowbanks peppered with cigarette butts. “The weather ain’t been bad, if you’re into masochistic bullshit,” Kahan quips.) In 1921, Wallace Stevens—who was born in Pennsylvania and spent much of his life in Connecticut—published “The Snow Man,” a perfect poem about attempting to receive the natural world on its own terms:
Stevens finds a kind of void opened up by the cold. Kahan does, too. On the chorus of the album’s title track, a lament for a broken relationship, he sings:
Kahan sings about drinking a lot— more specifically, about the pursuit of a kind of palliative self-obliteration. (He is also a vocal advocate for mental-health care, and has started a foundation, the Busyhead Project, to help fund it.) On “Dial Drunk,” he sings about trying to chug his way out of heartbreak and ending up hunched over in the back seat of a police cruiser:
I asked Kahan if the track was autobiographical—had he ever been shoved, face first, into the back seat of a cop car? “Yeah, no, I have not,” he said, laughing. “I just love characters so much. There is a lot of myself in every song. I would never yell at the police or throw a punch at somebody, but I’ve been in situations where I’m desperate to fix something that can’t be fixed. I like to not be limited by my own life experience, which in the past year and a half has not been very relatable and has been kind of weird.” He did admit that drugs and booze, which appear often in his songs, have at times been useful for dampening his anxiety and boredom. “I’ve used drugs and alcohol to help just block some of that noise out,” Kahan said. “It’s something that I am working on in therapy all the time.”
Kahan doesn’t drink while on tour, and he has a hard time writing songs, which is the other thing that helps him navigate difficult moments. “Writing has always been a way for me to figure out what I’m feeling,” he said. “Now I distract myself with social media, fall into a cycle, and feel worse afterwards. I don’t know—give me advice!” He added, “It’s hard to describe how lonely it is to have everybody think that you’re succeeding, and to feel that you’re barely managing. There are lots of beautiful moments, and I’m grateful for all of those. I’m so fuckin’ lucky and privileged to be in this position. But I still feel like every other human being: stress, anxiety. Recently, I’ve felt more of that than I’ve wanted to.”
This past December, Kahan performed “Stick Season” and “Dial Drunk” on “Saturday Night Live.” In an era in which pop stars are relying on visual spectacle, I found his performance exuberant, unfussy, and sincere. The stage was decorated with large sticks, a choice so literal I couldn’t help chuckling. A few days before the performance, Kahan told a reporter from the Times that he was so exhausted that having to drive from Vermont to New York City for the taping filled him with dread. Yet onstage he seemed seized by gratitude. During the final chorus of “Dial Drunk,” he announced, “I’ll die for you, ‘S.N.L.’! Or at least seriously injure myself!,” before bouncing around the stage with his band. In that moment, he looked happy, warm, free. ♦
