Noah Kahn: How he writes music is opening up to fans

NEW YORK –

Singer-songwriter Noah Kahan’s “Stick Season” is about New England — a subject the Vermont native says he could write about for the rest of his life — but it’s also largely about in-between spaces.

When resentment lingers, but forgiveness seems possible. When a broken friendship is just beginning to mend. When homesickness collides with a desire to leave. Or, in the case of the album’s title track, when autumn hasn’t turned into winter yet.

Writing the folk-pop album, he told The Associated Press, felt “like breathing.”

Kahan returns to those themes through a new lens on the recently released “Stick Season (We’ll All Be Here Forever),” a deluxe version of the album that adds six new tracks and an expanded version of fan-favorite “The View Between Villages”. The additions also make Kahan reflect on the eight months between the original album’s release and now.

“I’m talking about the highs and the lows,” Kahan said of reconciling the version of home he’d written about with reality. “And the truth is it’s always somewhere in the middle when you really go back.”

“Stick Season,” the song, went viral last year, racking up millions of streams, fueled largely by social media. It wasn’t his first major release — at age 26, Kahan has already released three studio albums and two EPs. But it was one with momentum: Fans had grabbed hold of the track long before its release, after hearing Kahan perform it on pandemic-era Instagram live streams and on shows that followed. When the single was released last July, Kahan called it “his favorite song ever” in a tweet.

Viral TikToks followed. Among them was a cover of two sisters harmonizing at a piano.

“We are Canadian. We are very Canadian. At that point, we had never left the country,” 24-year-old Moira MacMullin, one half of indie folk-pop duo Moira & Claire, told the AP. “But somehow we got into the emotions of it. There’s just something about his writing.”

Their TikTok video, which was posted the day after the song’s release, has now reached nearly 3 million views. Kahan commented on the TikTok: “Better than the original.” Moira MacMullin’s first trip outside of Canada would be to see Kahan perform in Vermont.

“Everyone in the audience is from Vermont, and I’m like (singing) ‘I love Vermont,’ and I’m not even from there,” she said. “It was so loud and just wild.”

Seeing fans connect with the lyrics and themes was “the coolest thing,” Kahan said, especially since “Stick Season” also marked his heartfelt embrace of the folk genre and youth influences like The Avett Brothers and Paul Simon.

“If I was in a studio writing songs that were more pop, I would go home and write a song that was more folk, just for me, because I felt like I had access to that inner child” , Kahan said of previous projects. “Being able to finally explore that in this record and really lean into those inspirations and those feelings was really liberating.”

Moments of humor throughout the album reflect Kahan’s personality. But the topics he dissects are heavy–in addition to heartbreak, isolation, and homesickness, there are references to substance abuse, death, depression, and divorce. Kahan’s storytellers aren’t perfect, but that’s the point.

Making the album about home, he said, felt like home. But watching it explode in the months that followed was emotionally and creatively challenging.

“I wanted to show people who I was and continue to do so in the context of ‘Stick Season’, but also explain this journey that I’ve been on over the last year, touring all the time and trying to be creative and feeling that I was a con artist,” said Kahan, who has long been open about his mental health, describing the motivation behind the deluxe album.

That meant introducing some acceptance and grace, to counter some of the resentment that he says permeated the original release: “In many ways, I’ve written this record as a letter to myself to say it’s okay to let this one go.” to feel things and that it’s okay to continue this journey.”

At a sold-out concert at New York’s Radio City Music Hall two days before the deluxe album’s release, Kahan encouraged “even the happiest person in the room” to seek therapy. He sang his lyrics, with their overt references to depression, medication and therapy, inviting the audience to shout back his words.

Dressed in deep green, brown, plaid and blue denim overalls, the audience agreed, making the atmosphere at Radio City one you’d find at summer camp — and not just because the show fell on a day when the air outside smelled of bonfire smoke.

“Writing songs has always been a way for me to process my emotions. Sometimes I’m not good at processing them in a very logical way. Sometimes I have to sit down and write a song to remember that’s how I felt ,” Kahan told the AP. “But for me the question is always, can this help someone get through their own discomfort…or problem or struggle?”

That’s part of why it felt like a natural step for him to launch The Busyhead Project, an initiative that aims to raise $1 million for organizations specializing in mental health resources and awareness. . The project, which launched last month and is named after his 2019 album, has already raised more than $340,000, with Kahan donating a portion of his tour ticket sales.

Joy Oladokun, Kahan’s tour opener, acknowledged her own mental health issues during her set. Her latest album, “Proof of Life,” features a collaboration with Kahan, the dark but also quite funny “We’re All Gonna Die.”

“For me, music was always about building bridges,” Oladokun told the AP.

Acknowledging difficult things in her songs or on stage before performing “is very, very central to my values,” like Kahan’s, she added. “That’s why I leave my house and go on tour in the first place.”

But honesty can be cruel. These songs aren’t always easy to sing — or sing along with.

“A lot of these songs are about shame and about substance abuse and about parental failings and family trauma. And those are tricky things,” Kahan said. “They’re a pain for me to write, and it’s a pain (for fans) to own and sing that in a show. But it’s beautiful, beautiful to watch.”

A song that has been embraced unexpectedly is ‘Orange Juice’. Kahan has said that the song, which references sobriety, is about two friends who reunite after their relationship fell apart due to a shared trauma.

“That’s a song I almost wouldn’t play because it felt so personal and so vulnerable,” said Kahan. Watching people own it on social media and at shows makes him proud.

“We write about heavy things and we deal with heavy things, and we are two sensitive people,” said Oladokun. But she also tries to keep some humor at the forefront of her projects. In the lyric video for “We’re All Gonna Die”, animated versions of the duo race coffins parody Mario Kart (which they also play together for sound check).

“We like to have fun too, you know?” she said.