Noah Kahan is arriving at his superstar moment: “I never thought this would happen to me”

Noah Kahan peers out from a Zoom window in a nondescript, half-lit room in New York City, his long black hair pulled back and his eyes betraying every mile swallowed by the wheels of his tour bus in the past years. “I never thought this was gonna happen to me,” he says, wearing an almost disbelieving smile. “I don’t have a lot of reference points for it.” But, in fairness, very few people do.

As we talk, Kahan is 36 hours out from Emma Stone introducing him to the audience at Saturday Night Live and performing his breakout single ‘Stick Season’. This is the latest domino to fall in the sort of breakout year that would scramble anyone’s senses. Released towards the tail-end of 2022 and supersized this summer by momentum-seizing new songs and starry collaborations with everyone from Post Malone to Kacey Musgraves, his third album ‘Stick Season’ has become a sleeper hit for the ages, its blend of picaresque storytelling and open-hearted Americana catapulting him from relative obscurity to the cusp of superstardom. Olivia Rodrigo recently covered the title track in Radio 1’s Live Lounge in a viral session with views that outstrip performances of her own material.

“I think that’s a lonely place to be, when you feel like something’s happening that no one can relate to,” he tells NME. “That’s something I carry with me and work on all the time. I’m doing my best to reach out to people I know are going through it. I’ve met some really wonderful people who have no reason to be a great resource for me other than being kind and willing to talk.”

Kahan made the trip down to New York from the sprawling acreage of his parents’ plot outside Strafford, Vermont – they’re divorced but live next door to one another – where he had holed up amid the early winter snow. There, he briefly pumped the brakes following a UK tour that ended with two packed, rapturous nights at the Forum in Kentish Town.

When he returns to Europe in February, he will trade theatres for arenas. Following that run, he has a run of enormous shows across North America, including two sellouts at Fenway Park in Boston and a headliner set at Atlanta’s Shaky Knees festival in May. Given that he’s now based out of Watertown, Massachusetts, that represents a homecoming so fanciful that he once light-heartedly promised to retire if he ever managed it. Rattling around in the background are Grammy noms and numbers that will give you a nosebleed — Kahan’s TikTok likes and monthly streaming stats resemble the populations of medium-sized countries; his 26m monthly listeners on Spotify exceed that of Australia.

Remarkably, though, the humanity in his music continues to cut through the noise. Kahan wrote ‘Stick Season’ while cut adrift in Strafford during the pandemic, uploading song fragments to TikTok before turning the resulting viral validation inward. He embraced levels of narrative ambition and specificity that eluded him on the surface-level guitar pop of his earlier records, writing songs that were honest and sometimes desolate, orbiting lacerating self-analysis, thwarted love, loss, and a bone-deep sense of isolation reflected by the LP’s eventual title.

“Stick season is between fall and the snow,” Kahan says. “It’s a time of transition in the weather, but also in a lot of people’s lives. A big part of my childhood was being surrounded by friends and family. I thought I was gonna go to college but, instead, I got a record deal. I was just at home in Vermont making music and my friends would come home for Thanksgiving, when stick season was in full swing. They would leave, and that loneliness would come back. [During COVID] that feeling of being left behind or out of place was at the forefront of my mind again.”

To reflect this depth of feeling, Kahan turned away from the palette that had sustained his career to that point. In 2019’s ‘Busyhead’ and 2021’s ‘I Was / I Am’ he made a couple of albums that sounded like what he thought a popular singer-songwriter might sound like – halfway between Ed Sheeran and a less bombastic Imagine Dragons. Nestled alongside the two was an EP called ‘Cape Elizabeth’, a short, sharp storytelling exercise recorded in a week with a friend, Phin Choukas, at his home studio in Vermont.

When they got into it, Kahan had just quit New York, finding that being alone in a crowd was much the same as being alone anywhere else. He used its songs to retreat into Maine, conjuring evocative acoustic narratives studded with granular details. When ‘Stick Season’ began percolating, its bare-bones approach shone back at him like the lighthouse on its sleeve. “That project is more important with hindsight, but at the time it was desperately needed for my mental health,” he says.

“It was the first time I made a record that spun a bit of a narrative. I feel like there was that intention behind setting a scene and bringing somebody into a place that I took into ‘Stick Season’ in a more focused way. Putting it out into the world and seeing people respond — people in California and Arizona singing about Maine — was like, ‘Okay, there’s relatability in these specific spaces.’”

As he grew more comfortable and confident in navigating this style of writing, ‘Stick Season’ came to crackle with what Welsh people call ‘hiraeth’ — a longing for home that is coloured by sadness bordering on grief. By tapping into that, along with embracing rock’s penchant for a proper noun, Kahan breathed fresh life into blueprints passed down by Mumford and Sons and the Lumineers. Nothing about this work is confected or cool – these are touchstones that matter to him regardless of their cultural baggage – and listeners have responded to it in part because of this overriding earnestness. “It’s not lost on me how rare it is to have your own truth be what has led to wider success,” Kahan says.

“What’s important is that the emotion leads to those specificities – you’re not just talking about the Walmart parking lot just because you happen to have a Walmart parking lot in your town,” he continues. “It’s about finding the balance, but I definitely want to include my own experience and memories in my music forever. It lets you feel like you’re visiting an old place – when I’m on the road, it allows me to go back and think about things that I can’t see anymore.”

Following SNL, Kahan will take a couple of weeks off before cranking through the gears again. He intends to spend them quietly and deliberately, maybe writing, hopefully resting, while essentially figuring out how to function as a human in his new normal. He knows he will likely be lost and lonely again at some point, even while being consistently confronted by thousands of fans who know where he came from and who he is. But that’s part of the journey.

“I always feel together with people on stage, but sometimes I feel even more alone afterwards,” he observes. “But I know every night I’ll see a bunch of people who are truly supportive, not just people who are there for a moment or to hear the song they heard on TikTok. It seems like everybody wants to say they were there in the beginning, and that’s amazing. It means that they truly care, they want to be here for the long run. That helps with loneliness. I’m surrounded by people I love all the time.”

Noah Kahan’s ‘Stick Season’ is out now. He tours the UK and beyond in 2024.

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