How Noah Kahan Maintains His Northern Attitude Under a Worldwide Spotlight

"That was one of the weirdest crowds we've ever played for," says a grinning Noah Kahan.

He's just closed out the Moon Crush Pink Moon "music vacation" with a set that, from the other side, was another success in a year full of triumphs. Backstage, Kahan appears to be riding high on the energy -- but the air goes out of him as he gets in his head. "Sometimes a festival crowd isn't all there for you."

It's an unexpected reaction, considering he was the only performer during the four-night beachside event to pack in the front row standing section. He even checks himself, changing his tune as he expresses gratitude for the sold-out crowd. Still, the suddenly famous folk-pop musician has his own perspective on the variability of audiences, keenly aware that a swift rise means not everyone at a festival may be fully on board with Noah Kahan. On the back of a single uber successful record, 2022's Stick Season, he's gone from respectable undercard billing to headliner. Two expanded editions and a Grammy nomination for Best New Artist have kept the rocket ride soaring, and even Kahan is still not used to his big font status.

"I'm always seeing the festival posters and seeing my name at the top like, 'Someone fucked up. It's a formatting error,'" he says with a self-effacing laugh. "It's crazy. I don't take any of it for granted, but sometimes it's hard to put yourself in what you feel like a headliner should be feeling like."

Upon first sitting down in the Pink Moon press area set up in a nearby condo, he removes a thick wallet from his back pocket. "It’s a Costanza wallet," he quips. "It’s all just key cards from different hotels around the country, and people’s numbers I felt too bad to not take from them on Venice Boardwalk. A lot of barbers in that wallet."

The signs of growth are everywhere. A few weeks later, he's Zooming in from a hotel in North Carolina, where he's headlining Lovin' Life Music Fest alongside Stevie Nicks and his "Dial Drunk" collaborator Post Malone. Earlier in the weekend, he'd played Atlanta's Shaky Knees, with Foo Fighters and Weezer on the same billing tier. On the cusp of a short break before a nearly sold out summer arena tour, he's only beginning to reflect on how his rapid ascension feels "in the context of what I had before."

"You're just grateful all the time -- for the people you've gotten to meet, and the crowds you've gotten to play for, and the places you've gotten to go," he says, his voice dipping despite talking about such highs. "And then you're also sad. I feel nostalgic for a time when I just felt like I wasn't under a lot of pressure and that I wasn't under a lot of scrutiny."

There's nothing truly novel in Kahan's complex feelings on fame. Having amassed a rabid fanbase on the back of unguarded lyrics and candidness about his severe anxiety and depression, they're not even unique to the 27-year-old's own narrative. The particularities of his coping with it all in such a compact timeframe, however, are.

His story has been recounted dozens of times over the last year: Pop artist yet to break out returns home to Strafford, Vermont during the pandemic. Gets inspired to revisit the folk sounds he connected with in his youth. Early version of a verse goes viral on TikTok. The future of folk-pop arrives with Stick Season, named after the bleak post-fall, pre-winter period of a New England year. Chart-topping hits, a major tour, big-name collaborations (Hozier, Kacey Musgraves, Brandi Carlile, Posty), et cetera follow.

Seven months after Stick Season’s release, Kahan's coming out party was the 2023 edition of Boston Calling, barely a 20 minute drive from where he then lived in Watertown, Massachusetts. If a son of the Northeast was about to become a megastar, a stage in the region's capital was the place to do it. Attracting the largest crowd in the festival's history, even Kahan was forced to wonder what was happening with his popularity.

"It felt like people had come to see me, and it was the first time I'd felt like that many people were interested in my music" Kahan recalls of the show. "Having that perspective kind of shift that day really woke me up to what was going on."

Kahan grants that he sonically operates in "the Mumford-verse," a world of Americana that packed arenas in the early 2010s. Mumford & Sons and The Lumineers remain (whatever your personal mileage) headliners today, but Kahan has provided the genre a Gen Z resurgence few saw coming. As much as the secret sauce of TikTok virality can be allusive, for a folk artist to take off the way Kahan has seems unlikely at best, anachronistic at least.

"I understand people's resistance to this kind of style that maybe died off a while ago in some ways and is coming back," he says. "People call me 'car commercial guy' or 'stomp and holler,' and I understand people saying it. But I also think there is a place for this kind of music."

Lumping himself in with this "verse" undersells Kahan's earnestness; his storytelling has drawn in his massive fanbase more than the instrumental trappings. That's how he'd like it, anyway, saying songwriting "should lead the way. I'm trying to have that be the thing that people stick around for."

His songs have indeed stuck with people -- millions of young people, predominantly. He can tune a line broadly to modern sensibilities ("So I took my medication and I poured my trauma out/ On some sad-eyed middle-aged man's overpriced new leather couch"), or regionally to small-town solitude ("Forgive my northern attitude, I was raised on little light"). Other songwriters may get more conceptual, but these detailed stories of yearning, alcohol, and barren New England winters have strong pop appeal. Just listen to him rattle off the pre-chorus in "She Calls Me Back" -- even an unviable phone number can be catchy.

Between Taylor Swift's 2020, Beyoncé's 2024, and Zach Bryan in between, perhaps it was inevitable that a folk-pop singer-songwriter was going to hit that Zoomer sweet spot with their acoustic guitar. Kahan just happened to arrive with the perfect storm of emotional relatability and, well, Northern Attitude.

Trying to pinpoint his connection with this generation, he credits having "grown up very much in the world that young people are living in, a chronically online and increasingly lonely place." He also cites his songs' "lack of the total seriousness that sometimes comes into this music."

"I try to include some of the way I was raised," he says. "I grew up in a family where everyone struggled with depression, but everyone was really funny. It always felt like we were able to laugh at ourselves and see some of the absurdity of things. I try to bring that into my music."

He also brings that humor to his "chronically online" social presence as he discusses hemorrhoids or mocks himself for an awful first pitch at a Red Sox game. "I just want to be able to laugh at myself. Nothing's that fucking serious," he says. "Like, I threw a first pitch that barely made it over home plate. I laughed at myself, dude. And trust me, I was embarrassed. I was sinking to my knees embarrassed."

Maintaining his confessional, "goofball" (his word) personality in both public persona and lyricism has fostered the sort of parasocial fan relationships elevating many modern pop stars. It helps when those pop stars are also amplifying your folk songs, as Olivia Rodrigo did by covering "Stick Season" for BBC Radio 1 Live Lounge last October. Kahan says the cover "transformed that song, and I think in a lot of ways my career."

"I always just wanted to play shows for a sold out crowd, whether it's a 500-capacity room or whatever it is," says Kahan, who was already booking five-figure venues before Rodrigo's rendition or his cameo at her Madison Square Garden show in April. "I think a major pop star like Olivia Rodrigo covering a song that is a little bit more folky and is a little bit more organic sounding legitimized that style of song and my style of songwriting to a really large audience."

Of course, more attention brings more judgement. When your sound has already been disparagingly dubbed "stomp and holler," you're entering the critical conversation at a disadvantage. When that same sound takes you to such heights so quickly, skepticism becomes the starting point of scrutiny. The three versions of Stick Season in a 500-day span, the wounded but funny white guy from the woods schtick, the screaming teenage girls in the crowds -- it all gets boiled down to promotional budgets and tenuous, melodramatic pathos.

"The hardest thing for me has been to let go of people's opinions," Kahan admits after reading some unflattering Instagram comments about his Shaky Knees set. "Sameer [Gadhia] from Young the Giant told me, 'When you get to a certain place, as many people that love you are going to hate you.' Because they don't know you, and they've been exposed to you through the marketing that's done or just kind of [your] presence being around a lot. It's been hard for me, honestly, to deal with the influx of people who weren't gonna like [the music] anyways."

Processing the increased criticism is particularly hard in light of the path Kahan took to reach this point. While his 2019 Busyhead debut and 2021's I Was / I Am both featured some strong efforts, like the latter's "Godlight" and Joy Oladokun collab "Someone Like You," the songwriting was diluted under a radio sheen. The first strummings of Stick Season were there, but Kahan is the first to admit there's a gap in his connection to that era. In that space sits the 2020 Cape Elizabeth EP, written and recorded over one week in 2020 while I Was / I Am was deep in the works but yet unfinished.

"Once I had felt what I felt with Cape Elizabeth, it was hard for me to feel that same excitement about I Was / I Am," he says, "because I knew it didn't come from that same place of purity."

Pure, like Vermont maple syrup.

Vermont's sprawling farm land and hiking trails have been ingrained into the saga of Kahan. Returning there uncorked an identity he'd tried (and failed) to escape in his attempts to make ballad-y pop hits in New York and Los Angeles. Out poured Cape Elizabeth and, eventually, Stick Season. If the word weren't so coded and trite, you might even call it authentic.

The irony is that tapping into that authenticity is exactly what's elevated him to the utterly unnatural world of music superstardom, of SNL performances and Sesame Street appearances. It's a dichotomy he's still figuring out.

In February, Vanity Fair released a "Noah Kahan Gets Ready for the Grammys" video, in which Kahan discusses wearing his first fitted suit after borrowing a friend's dad's wedding attire his whole life. He jokes about feeling like he'd "lost myself completely in all this" when he turned down chocolate covered strawberries at the Beverly Hills Hilton because he needed a nap. During our second conversation, he facetiously calls his hotel room's lack of a mug for his tea "the worst thing that's ever happened to me, for sure."

"These are the issues that are in my life," he laughs. "Nothing for real is happening here."

But, he is experiencing real things having real impact. "Back home in the studio, the process is a really honest process emotionally. I find out where I am, and if it’s good, it’s good, and if it’s bad, it’s bad. But I stay there," Kahan says. "On the road, I feel like I leave the stage feeling like I’m on top of the world, and the next morning it's like the void is just calling me. It’s been hard for me to find a time to be creative, which has been a really difficult side effect of this year."

Explaining how he tries to stay true to what brought him all this acclaim, Kahan anxiously chases his own thoughts: "I think I had to make a decision a long time ago, way before this shit happened to me, that I wasn't a good enough actor to be cool or to be super social or to be this character... I feel like I've always been like, if I'm gonna have success, it has to be just the way I like to do things, the way I like to be. It has to be based on how I really feel and I can't put on masks. I put on nice clothes, and I feel like I'm wearing a..."

He rubs his eyes and resets.

"Look, I'll put it like this: The imposter syndrome is what I think makes me feel maybe relatable to people, or makes me seem like I'm doing well with all of it and staying true to myself -- but it also makes me feel like I don't belong. And so it's this hard line to walk where yeah, I can be in a five-star hotel room getting my fitted suit on and I can come across feeling like I don't belong there and that makes people feel like they're like me, but the truth is I do actually feel like that. And it's a shitty way to feel.

"The truth is, I've been feeling that my whole life, so this is kind of just an extension of that feeling... It feels really good to know that I've [been able to relate to people] just being me, but it is really hard to sustain this feeling of being an outsider in all this. I feel like that's been the hardest thing about some of my success."

And the cycle continues: the vulnerability that made Kahan appealing gets magnified by the fame it's wrought, which he in turn speaks of with vulnerability. Witnessing the thought pattern in action, it's easy to see where he got the name for his debut LP and why he repurposed it for his mental health foundation, The Busyhead Project.

In the plot of his career, Kahan's wellness advocacy runs parallel to his New England upbringing. Giving it equal footing in his lyrics wasn't enough. "A lot of the mental health stuff, I felt they would have to listen to my music [to get it]," he says. "And then it's like, 'What do I do with this guy? Sad. He's sad. Whatever.'" He expresses concerns over "accessorizing" his struggles "just to maybe unconsciously elicit emotion instead of bringing together a solution."

So he created an actual solution. The Busyhead Project has raised over $2 million in its first year to support mental health organizations across the US and Canada. In a statement marking Mental Health Awareness Month, Kahan announced that The Busyhead Project Action Village, connecting fans with local mental health organizations and voter registration courtesy of HeadCount, will be present at every upcoming US stop of his "We'll All Be Here Forever Tour." There's a new partnership with music industry mental health nonprofit Backline, linking industry professionals and their families with invaluable resources.

Kahan recently started meeting with more of the partner organizations to better understand how The Busyhead Project can help and "just to say thank you to these people." He's involved in every hiring call for the touring Village. Finding ways to be hands-on even as his music takes off is more than just legitimizing what he sings about -- though it's that too. "I want someone that fucking hates my music to go get help," he says.

He explains that many decisions around his music career can seem "flighty," with people on all sides arguing over the choices he makes. "Starting a charity like this is something just good," he asserts. "It makes me feel good and it makes me feel like I don't have this paranoid thought of, 'Am I doing this for a selfish reason?'"

Even so, Kahan says it can be "a recipe for a nightmare from an imposter syndrome sufferer standpoint." Giving space for the "ups and downs" of his own mental health, he admits, "It makes you feel like such a fucking fraud when you're lying in bed depressed, not taking care of yourself, knowing that you're putting things out in the world telling other people how to take care of themselves. It makes you feel like a hypocrite. The intent of the charity and the intent of what I'm trying to say to the kids listening to my music is that it's always worth striving for, no matter what the next day looks like for you, striving to make things better for yourself and for others. I know that in my heart."

The Busyhead Project keeps him tethered to his own mental health journey even as it becomes wrapped in his narrative. Thankfully, Vermont still serves the same purpose for the other parts of his identity. Yes, they sell his T-shirts in the local general store, but Kahan doesn't feel like he's "surrounded by my career" at home.

"I went home a couple weeks ago. I hung out with my boys, went fishing, went to play golf, ran out of gas on the fucking highway, saw my mom and my dad," he says. "It’s so weird -- it’s a place that in a lot of ways made me have some success and exposure, but it also still feels like this indifferent place that doesn’t care about that. And I like that."

That's not to say he looks forward to leaving the "many cool milestones" of the last year behind. Quite the opposite, as he hates "the idea of getting off the road and forgetting about what the feelings that I get to experience are." But that's a very different reality from the desolate northeastern Stick Season that inspired the trajectory he's now on. The "inflation and deflation" of touring isn't "conducive to the grounded creative experience" that led Kahan to headliner status.

"I don't feel inspired anywhere near as much as I do in Vermont," Kahan affirms.

That means even if it's not another "I Love Vermont" record, whatever comes next has to be as personal to him as Stick Season. "I just won't ever make music again if it doesn't make me feel like when I made this record. Because it’s an unbearable experience to be making music, to be doing something that’s supposed to be your dream job, that’s already really fucking hard and stressful, and to be hating it at the same time. My goal is to be in love, in love, in love with the process."

Collaborators he dreams of joining that process include members of boygenius, Bon Iver's Justin Vernon, The National's Aaron Dessner, and Waxahatchee's Katie Crutchfield. All of them are on the table for a star like Kahan, but before his team makes any of those phone calls, he knows he has to reconnect with what opened that contact list in the first place.

"All I can do is take the lesson I learned from the success of this record, which is that it came from me feeling passion about music again, and falling in love with this idea and the story. And needing to say it for my own sake. Of course I want my fans to have music, but I want my fans to have the best possible version of myself, and that means I have to find this feeling again."

As he looks ahead at a few weeks off, he says he's "starting to get little pieces of it." Between the massive stages, the still growing attention, and the imposter syndrome of it all, he's serving many more gods than he was just a year ago. "There's so many different people that I'm trying to make happy. And then I think, I have to have myself be one of those somewhere in the mix," he says.

"I've achieved a lot of great things. If my next record fucking flops, I'll be happy knowing that I've always done what felt right and natural instead of maybe having a crazy amount of success next year by doing what feels completely wrong and feels painful and scary and overwhelming. It's not worth it; nothing is worth the feeling of not belonging anywhere and feeling like a fraud. Nothing is worth that at all. It's cool that right now it seems to be helping me to be myself. And I hope that continues to be the case, 'cause that's all I know how to do."

Watch our interview with Noah Kahan from Topeka's Moon Crush Pink Moon festival via YouTube.