Noah Kahan Reflects on Stardom and Mental Health in New Album

Noah Kahan Became a Superstar By Being Himself

He made his name writing beautifully open songs about everything from his home state to his mental health. Now he has millions of fans, and he's still processing it all

By Angie Martoccio

Angie Martoccio

Contact Angie Martoccio on X

- Noah Kahan Became a Superstar By Being Himself - Noah Kahan Became a Superstar - The Best Yacht Rock Guitar Solos, From ‘Reelin’ in the Years’ to ‘Baby Come Back’

View all posts by Angie Martoccio

Photographs by DANNY CLINCH May 5, 2026

I ’m fishing with Noah Kahan , and things are looking pretty bleak. We’re at a farm an hour west of Nashville, standing in front of a pond, casting our respective rods and waiting patiently. It’s a perfect day for fishing — an afternoon in early April, not too windy, the sky so clear and blue its reflection bounces off the water. But so far, nothing’s biting. Still, Kahan remains hopeful, as a camera crew looks on. “If we catch tilapia,” the 29-year-old songwriter says, “we’ll go viral as fuck.”

As the minutes tick by, that seems less and less likely. Kahan works the line firmly, wearing faded blue Levi’s, a button-down flannel, and suede boots. “I feel like my team’s been dressing me more and more in cowboy-looking stuff, and they’re eventually going to have to accept that I’m not even close to a cowboy,” he says. His shoulder-length brown hair matches his rugged beard. If you were thinking about poking fun of Kahan’s look on social media, rest assured he’s beat you to it. “Jesus Christ,” “Depressed Keanu Reeves,” and “Jewish Capaldi” are just some of the nicknames he’s given himself over the years. (Kahan took a break from Twitter, but recently returned, which he likens to “LeBron coming back to Cleveland.”)

This self-deprecating charm is part of Kahan’s appeal, and one reason among many that millions of listeners fell hard for the Vermont-raised songwriter back in 2022. That’s when he broke through, seemingly out of nowhere, with “ Stick Season ,” written after he’d moved back home to his parents’ property in Strafford during the pandemic (he now splits his time between Vermont and Nashville). The highly addictive folk-pop song — which grapples with heartbreak amid that grim, lifeless in-between period in the Northeast, after the fall foliage and before the first snowfall — blew up on TikTok.

“Stick Season,” and the album of the same name, earned Kahan a Best New Artist Grammy nomination and a musical guest spot on Saturday Night Live . Soon, he started selling out arenas, where fans would shout and sob along to his songs — deceptively simple melodies with intricate lyrics that are simultaneously ultra-specific and highly relatable, often about love, mental-health struggles, and the joys and frustrations of growing up in a small town.

Editor’s picks

The 250 Greatest Albums of the 21st Century So Far

The 100 Best TV Episodes of All Time

The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time

100 Best Movies of the 21st Century

“It’s refreshing to me that someone like Noah has become a superstar, because he’s the anti-idol,” says producer (and co-founder of the National) Aaron Dessner , who’s worked with Kahan. “He’s not seeking it. He’s far more gifted than anyone might really know unless you’ve been up close to hear him sing. He’s one of the most brilliant songwriters we have today, and we should make a lot of records.”

“Stick Season” helped turn Kahan into a big name and a hero throughout New England (in addition to his native Vermont, he’s also lived in New Hampshire and, later, Massachusetts, and even has a collaboration with L.L. Bean). But he’s a different kind of superstar — a down-to-earth and delightful human who exudes everyman energy, and whose idea of a good time is hanging out with his two German shepherds and smoking weed. It’s almost as if your sweet, stoner neighbor accidentally got famous but still invites you over for Taco Bell on Tuesday nights (specifically to consume the Crunch Wrap Supreme, ­Kahan’s favorite). So it’s not totally surprising that Kahan found that fame took some getting used to, and that success doesn’t fix everything. “Every cliché about music has proven so true for me,” he says. “Like, ‘You can get everything you want, and it’s still not going to do it!’”

Watch the video interview below

It was here, on the 183 acres that make up Fire Tower Farm, that Kahan recorded a portion of his new album, The Great Divide , which just debuted at Number One on the Billboard 200 chart. The record — produced by Dessner, Kahan, and Kahan’s Stick Season collaborator Gabe Simon — shows off his knack for visceral storytelling, while offering a front-row seat to Kahan’s inner monologues about, among other topics, his relationships, from childhood and now, and his forever ties to his home state. The time he spent making the album wasn’t entirely tranquil; it was, in fact, a bit terrifying.

Related Content

J Balvin and Ryan Castro: From Colombia to the World

Good Luck Not Crying to Noah Kahan and Hayley Williams’ Performance of ‘Downfall’

Noah Kahan to Headline Rolling Stone’s Inaugural Stateside Festival This July 4th Weekend

Noah Kahan’s 'The Great Divide' Is Already an Amazon Bestseller: Here’s How to Get the Vinyl

But before we get to any of that, Kahan wants to reel one in. It doesn’t help that the first two rods I used were dysfunctional, or that an island of moss is barricading us from the vertebrates (each time I reel in soggy greens, Kahan says something reassuring like, “You do the salad, I’ll do the protein!” or “It’s called fishing, not catching!”). Kahan has been fishing for most of his life, but he got more into it during the pandemic, when his brother Richard bought “a shitty old boat.” Drinking beers and catching fish with family and friends, Kahan was able to do something he finds more and more difficult these days: relax.

After nearly an hour, we concede that it’s just not going to happen. The crew stops filming, preparing to relocate to another area on the farm. But Kahan lingers behind at the pond, determined to win. “Forget the interview,” he says. “I want to see you catch a fish.”

TO BE WELL-VERSED in Kahanology, you should know that it’s pronounced Kahn , not Ka-han . “I just say one of the A’s is silent,” Kahan says. “You can choose which one.” Secondly, you should get acquainted with some of the imagery in his songs. Kahan loves to write about porches (“Porch Light,” “American Cars,” “We Go Way Back,” “All Them Horses”), ghosts (“Halloween,” “Your Needs, My Needs,” “The Great Divide”) and drinking (too many to name).

On The Great Divide, bugs creep into everything. Kahan teased the record back in December 2025, with the TikTok account The Last of the Bugs, which is a line from his 2022 song “The View Between Villages.” The Last of the Bugs almost became the title of the new album, but Kahan felt it was a little too esoteric (he did use it to title the expanded edition). The insects appear as a motif in the new songs, particularly the slow-burning opener, “End of August,” and the tender finale, “Dan,” a bookend for the 17-track journey.

Bugs have always been a good omen for Kahan. His mom, Lauri, used to call him her “little bug,” and he kept finding ladybugs around Fire Tower Farm while making The Great Divide, which reaffirmed his belief that he was in the right place after some rough patches early in the process for The Great Divide . “Bugs represent these things that go away but return,” he says. “In the winter, I was in that cold feeling, where there’s nothing around and nothing’s alive. And when I started feeling happier and creative again, I felt like I could hear the beetles and the crickets. They started to return for the spring, so I see them as a metaphor for what I’m going through in my life.” (As we’re having this conversation, a ladybug appears on my shoulder.)

Bugs also appear on “Downfall,” a devastating, soulful plea for a loved one to fail so they return home. “Tell me when you miss the climb from a hole that has no bottom” is a line that resonates with Dessner. “There’s these phrases that he says which capture human suffering in a way that is so relatable and also clever, [but] feels uncontrived,” he says. “You can just tell it just comes out of him.”

> “I was sick of it. This thing that’s supposed to be so fun is making you anxious all the time.”

One of Kahan’s musical heroes, Bon Iver ’s Justin Vernon, contributes backing vocals and banjo on the track, and plays electric guitar and more on several others. They met at a music festival in Iowa in 2023, but Vernon sent his contributions remotely. “He’s such a mythical figure in my head that it’s cool to have him just float into my songs,” Kahan says. “It’s like a mysterious wood person will lay down guitar and I won’t see it, but it’ll come through email and I’ll be like, ‘Oh, my God, this is him.’”

Vernon famously made Bon Iver’s 2007 indie classic For Emma, Forever Ago while secluded in a cabin outside his hometown of Eau Claire, Wisconsin. After “Stick Season” changed his life, Kahan craved that kind of isolation and focus for himself. “It felt like the way I’ve always wanted to make music,” he says. “Having him be a part of this process made me feel more connected. [Because] there were more eyes on all of it, and more pressure.”

This pressure nearly prevented a new Noah Kahan album from happening at all. Ever since his tour wrapped in September 2024, the idea of following up Stick Season consumed him. “Right after the tour, I was just sick of it,” he says. “This thing that’s supposed to be so fun and so rewarding is becoming tiring and making you anxious all the time.”

Kahan started to rethink his career, searching for other ways to spend his next few years while he figured things out. He thought about enrolling in psychology classes at a community college, and even got fingerprinted to be a substitute teacher. At one point, he considered becoming a groundskeeper at a golf course, repairing divots. “I thought that would be such a therapeutic thing,” he says.

In late 2024, Kahan made the first of four visits to Dessner’s Long Pond Studio. Located in upstate New York, it’s a woodsy, cozy spot that Dessner describes as “a weird combination of a church and garage.” Dessner’s résumé, which includes co-founding one of the most prominent indie bands of this century and production credits for several A-list stars, made Kahan nervous. “I was Wikipedia-ing it before I got there,” he says. “I was like, ‘Oh, my God, this guy’s such a legend. He’s done Bon Iver and Taylor and Gracie and all these artists that I really admire. But Aaron is the coolest dude ever. He understood where I was at, and how I was struggling and feeling burnt out. He was really receptive to that.”

The sessions were productive, even if Kahan wasn’t necessarily expecting them to be. “There’s something about the energy [at Long Pond],” Dessner says. “And maybe it’s because I’ve been in the band forever and made a lot of other records with other people [who] have been struggling, but when he came, I felt that he was where he needed to be.… The first thing he said when he walked in was like, ‘Hey, I’m excited to hang out, but I really don’t think we’re going to make any songs because I don’t know what I could possibly say. I’ve just been so burnt out and kind of lost.’ But within less than an hour, we’d written ‘Porch Light.’ It felt instantaneous in that way — this river of ideas.”

But everything came to a halt in March 2025, when Kahan headed out West, to Joshua Tree, California, to write. He’s taken to calling the trip “my infamous Joshua Tree OCD meltdown.” Kahan found himself in an Airbnb completely made of glass, lonely as hell. “Joshua Tree was horrible,” he says, now sitting beside a fire in the farmhouse’s backyard. “I can’t even tell you how not better I felt after going

_Originally reported by [Rolling Stone](https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/noah-kahan-shell-1235557494/)._