The secret life of Noah Kahan: pop’s sudden superstar on No1s, packed arenas – and impostor syndrome | Folk music

At the Grammys the other week, Noah Kahan looked around – at Beyoncé, at Taylor Swift – and thought: “No one’s going to tell me that I belong here.” Never mind that he had been nominated for best new artist, or that his album was riding high in the US and UK charts. The impostor syndrome was strong.

He took his mother, who had a wonderful time. “I was sitting by myself, like: ‘Whoa, I am the least cool guy at the party right now.’ My mom is killing it, everyone around me is killing it. It played into this idea that I have about myself – which isn’t healthy – that I don’t belong.” He smiles. “I could have gotten up and said hello to somebody – it’s my own making.” Sitting on a sofa at his record label’s office in London, he laughs at himself. “It’s one of those things that I need to work on, finding out how to feel deserving and worthy.”

That the 27-year-old can make going to the Grammys, in all its unreal fabulousness, relatable goes a long way to explaining his appeal. He is on a mostly sold-out arena tour of Europe and North America and travelled down from Leeds this morning. On the train, he was thinking about how, with his fancy new life, he will be able to continue to write the kind of songs with which millions of people have connected. “How am I supposed to pretend that I’m sitting in my dad’s house wishing I could get out of there? I’m getting hair and makeup done and someone’s handed me a coffee. I don’t think I’m living a very relatable experience to a lot of people.”

But maybe that won’t matter. “Because I didn’t think Vermont was going to be relatable, necessarily.”

The New England state is where he grew up and where he wrote his third album, Stick Season, which was released in 2022 and has just reached No 1 in the UK. This month, it was updated – for a second time – to include collaborations with artists including Brandi Carlile, Hozier and Post Malone. Many of its songs are place-specific, but have universal appeal. Embraced by a generation that is mindful about mental health and knows how to talk about it, Kahan speaks about belonging and not belonging, yearning for home, fearing that you will never leave your smalltown. You don’t have to be from Strafford, Vermont, to know what it’s like to meet up with friends who are also home for Christmas, or to feel that others have moved on and left you behind.

Kahan spent his childhood in Vermont and New Hampshire, the third of four children (his father worked in IT and his mother was an author). He started writing music when he was about eight, then got a guitar when he was 10; he and his dad would learn Beatles and Cat Stevens songs. He loved Green Day’s American Idiot: “That awoke some tortured thing in me, because that was an album with so much angst and anger – and really beautiful storytelling. I just wanted to sound like Green Day.”

At high school, his songs started attracting the attention of older kids who were producing and putting tracks online. A record company approached Kahan’s family. The day he signed a record deal was thrilling; he was 17 and thought he had made it. “I was like: this is it, I’m going to be in LA partying and I’m so glad I decided not to go to college, because my friends are going to be so jealous of my cool life.” He laughs. “My friends all went to college and I was still home for a year and a half after I got signed. It was at the time when Hozier, James Bay, George Ezra were all blowing up, to name a few, and I think they were looking at me as someone that fit that mould – I had long hair, an acoustic guitar.”

Then he moved to Nashville, where he “lived the life of a low-priority artist, trying to figure out what works”. He became “kind of exhausted by that. I was definitely trying to be someone that I wasn’t.” Whether that was Ed Sheeran, or any of the many white, male twentysomething singer-songwriters who had made it big, it felt inauthentic. In any case, save for one single that went gold in the US – 2017’s Hurt Somebody – it didn’t work.

The part he did like was touring, supporting artists such as Bay and Leon Bridges. “I was able to express myself on stage a bit more and felt like I was coming into my own – this more folky live performance element that made me happy. Then I was going back to Nashville or New York or LA to write songs, which always kind of bummed me out.” He describes it as “growing pains”, but with youthful naivety that it would all work out. “I was afraid of failure, but I was, like: someone is going to come in and save me, the label won’t drop me. That’s not true at all; people get dropped all the time. I was lucky the team were supportive.”

He was also struggling with poor mental health, something he had been dealing with for years. When Kahan was about eight or nine, he started experiencing episodes of depersonalisation – the feeling of being outside yourself. “I feel like I’m floating above myself and I come to this sudden realisation that I don’t feel like I am in the world – it’s like living in a dream. I think, looking back, that’s probably the first manifestation of my depression and anxiety.” He took Prozac in high school, had therapy, did exercise, ate well. Then he came to the realisation that “it never really leaves”.

In his early 20s – when he was putting himself under pressure to become successful, but not producing work of which he was particularly proud – Kahan had a breakdown of sorts. “I was just so burnt out,” he says. “I was in one of those deep downswing depression things, where you’re doing every single thing that’s going to make you feel shittier, but it’s the only thing that feels good. For me, it’s binge-eating, smoking weed, not sleeping enough, being on my phone all day and looking at my name online to see if anyone cares about me any more.”

It was a time, he says, when he would look up songwriters on Wikipedia, to find out their biggest song, and emulate it: “Just a false existence where I felt like I was taking up space in the world and wasting my time. That was a dark place and my parents … I’ll never forget how kind and receptive they were to talking to me and letting me know that I was going to be OK – and getting me some help.”

Therapy helped. “I tried to be more honest and more vulnerable,” he says. “I preached vulnerability in my music, but in my own life I wasn’t being vulnerable enough with myself.” He was on antidepressants while he was writing Stick Season, then he panicked, thinking “medication is going to block off this creativity”. He came off them too quickly, which brought withdrawal symptoms. “It would have been so much better if I just stayed on it. You stay on the medication, you feel blunted; you get off of it and you’re too fucked up to do anything. I was kind of trapped in this shitty choice I had to make.”

Does he still experience depersonalisation? “I do, when I’m really stressed out,” he says. Grammy week was tough – feeling as if he was in a foreign environment, with all the excitement and busyness around it. Sometimes, he feels it on stage. He is glad he has been so open, particularly on tour, “so I’m not feeling that I’m about to break some big secret. I go through hills and valleys. It’s something I have to keep a constant watch over.”

In 2020, as the pandemic started, Kahan fled New York and went back to his parents’ place in Vermont, on a huge tranche of land and woods. His debut album, Busyhead, had come out the year before and had been largely ignored. He felt like a failure. With touring impossible, he came close to abandoning his career.

But there was something about being at home again with his siblings, as well as the beauty of Vermont, that brought Kahan closer to the songwriting teenager he had been, before he started trying to become a commercial pop star. Around the same time, his parents were separating. They are now divorced, but live on nearby properties on their land. “It was just raw and real and I could see them working through it. It taught me a lot about emotional honesty. It was something important for me to see,” he says.

Kahan wrote some songs that were more folky and introspective and recorded an EP, Cape Elizabeth, in a week with a local producer. The time limit was freeing: “There wasn’t a lot of opportunity to doubt or analyse or overcorrect. I think I had been caring so much that you could tell in the previous music – it was so tense and insecure, and not in a good way.”

The new work wasn’t a radical departure from his earlier stuff, which had a folky tinge, but it felt more emotional and perhaps less cravenly commercial. The EP did OK: “It found a smaller following of people that were really dedicated to it. And I was really dedicated to it.” The album that followed, I Was/I Am, showed an artist grappling with his identity; it had some nice songs, but you can still hear an inauthenticity in his younger voice. It failed to chart.

He loves Mumford & Sons, the widely mocked banjo-strumming stars of the 2010s’ folk-pop revival. Did he worry that some of that disdain would rub off on him? Does he care about being considered cool? “No, I don’t think I care that much,” he says, smiling. “I think that ship left the dock the first photoshoot I ever did. I was like: oh, OK, that’s what I look like? It’s over. It’s also just exhausting trying to be cool, to feel like I’m doing something brand new or genre-bending. I don’t have the energy for it. I can’t bend the genre right now – I’m exhausted! I’m just going to play my fucking mandolin, all right?”

Writing Stick Season was, he says, “the happiest I’ve ever been in my entire life, creatively”. Driving to the recording studio in southern Vermont, he would feel as if he was living in the album: “I’m making an album about Vermont, about New England; only I can tell my specific story. It made me realise: man, I actually never felt this way about my own music.”

When he was writing the title song, it was TikTok, where he would upload verses and the chorus as he created them, that drove its success. His label’s parent company, Universal, is in a battle with TikTok over payment, and has pulled its music from the platform, including Kahan’s. The dispute “kind of sucks”, he says: “I built a huge following on TikTok, so I have an amazing foundation, which is super-fortunate. But there are some people, especially young, developing artists, or artists that are about to break through, that now don’t have that. I hope people are not being, like: I’m going to quit, because I think that if you’re really talented and you have a story to tell, you’ll find a way for people to hear it.”

In July, Kahan’s tour will reach Boston’s 38,000-capacity Fenway Park, a place that loomed large in his childhood idea of what mega-success would look like. He still finds it hard to accept; there is a nagging fear that an arena has been booked in his name by mistake.

“It feels too simple that I’ve made music that I really care about, that I’m proud of, and it’s connected with people. To me, there has to be some underlying dark force that’s fabricating this.” He laughs again. On a bad day, when the songwriting feels forced, “then I’ll go play an arena show and it’s like: oh my God, they’re all being fooled by me – I’m tricking them into thinking I’m something I’m not.” And on a good day? “I feel like I’m on top of the world.”

Stick Season (Forever) is out now in the UK on Island Records