Noah Kahan on ‘existing in a place that you've just written about’

Noah Kahan remembers getting excited when a song he put on SoundCloud hit a thousand plays. Now, his songs have been streamed more than one billion times. Kahan’s metaphorical use of “stick season,” the time between Vermont foliage and proper snow, went viral on TikTok last year and sparked covers by Zach Bryan, Chelsea Cutler, Maisie Peters and countless fans who recorded themselves strumming in their bedrooms. The album that followed, recorded in Guilford, debuted at #14 on the Billboard 200 Chart and has been Kahan’s most successful to date. He performed on Jimmy Kimmel Live and the Kelly Clarkson Show and sold out venues coast to coast. And then, after the first leg of his tour, he returned home to the Upper Valley and the isolated, between-villages places he crystallized on his third full-length album, Stick Season. With lyrics that describe “dirt roads named after high school friends’ grandfathers,” the record is, in Kahan’s words, “a love letter to New England.” Turns out returning to a place you’ve described so candidly can feel a bit strange. He’s had to reconcile his romanticized version of Vermont with the reality: He’s just home, and it's cold, and he has to go outside and clean up after the dog.There’s a “weirdness of existing in a place that you've just written about,” he said. Kahan is going back on tour later this month. He’ll return to Vermont this summer, for two sold-out shows on the Burlington waterfront. He joined VTDigger on Zoom earlier this month.