advertisement
advertisement
Popular
Latest News
advertisement
advertisement
advertisement
Features
‘Every Moment Is Massive and Magnificent’: Noah Kahan Reflects on a Monumental Year — And Eyes a Grammys Breakthrough
advertisement
As Noah Kahan, resolutely normal 29-year-old newlywed, he has a lot of weddings to attend during the time off. As Noah Kahan, stadium-packing folk-pop sensation, he still has a few work obligations too. There’s his Emmys appearance, where he sang “Bridge Over Troubled Water” during the In Memoriam segment, followed by his annual Folk & Fairways golf tournament and headlining concert in Vermont that benefits his mental health nonprofit, The Busyhead Project. This year, the two-day event raised $3 million, boosting the organization’s total to $13 million since launching in 2023. In his last week off, as temperatures in Vermont dip into the 60s, he’s hoping to bust out his fall wardrobe.
“I have a lot of light sweaters and pants that are cool, a lot of beanies,” he says, as if visualizing how cozy he will soon be. “Summer has been great, but I feel like I’ve been touring so much that I’ve kind of missed it. And no matter where I am, it’s just hot. So I’m excited for it to be chilly, get all emo, nostalgic smells, stuff like that.”
advertisement
Kahan famously captures the feeling of that seasonal shift — which he dubs “late-August angst” — on “End of August,” the opening track of The Great Divide, his acclaimed fourth album that debuted atop the Billboard 200 following its April 24 release. An arguably now more famous line comes right before that, when he declares: “The minute that September hits/I’m going off my medicine.” He did not.
“I think when I wrote that I was like, ‘Oh, hopefully by the end of August I’ll be ready to get off them,’ ” he says. “No. We’re still on. Please do not go off your medication. Listen to that doctor on TikTok, not me.”
That kind of candor about, well, everything in his life — from medication and mental health to family ties and traumas — is precisely what has made Kahan such a widely embraced star, though he’d never call himself one: “I don’t consider myself anything,” he says with a shrug. The way he sings about it all, setting his rich and layered storytelling to lush, rootsy instrumentation, has established him as one of this generation’s most gifted songwriters. But before The Great Divide took shape, Kahan wasn’t sure that he’d reach this point.
advertisement
Discovered at just 18 on SoundCloud by his now-longtime manager Drew Simmons, Kahan signed a record deal in 2015 with Republic Records by then-vp of A&R Ben Adelson. (Kahan’s team, including THE·TEAM’s Joe Atamian and Paige Maloney, who book him in North and South America, have all been with him from day one.) “It was pretty simple,” Adelson says today. “Heard the music and was immediately like, ‘He’s an amazing songwriter.’ ” It’s what hooked Simmons, too, “first and foremost” and made him bet on a little-known teen from Vermont. “I thought for certain something great was going to come out of this songwriter at some point,” he says.
advertisement
He was right, though it took years of patience and trust in the direction Kahan wanted to pursue. After emerging as Republic’s buzzy new alternative-pop artist, his 2019 debut full-length, Busyhead (largely produced by Joel Little), debuted atop Billboard’s now-defunct Heatseekers Albums chart while follow-up album I Was / I Am inched closer toward the sound he’s since become known for.
Found shirt and pants, Marc Nolan shoes.Emman Montalvan
What came next, to put it plainly, changed Kahan’s life. When his third album, Stick Season, arrived in 2022, it debuted at No. 14 on the Billboard 200 and brought folky pop-rock to the highest reaches of the all-genre charts for the first time in over a decade. Eight months after its release, with the arrival of its 2023 deluxe edition, Stick Season (We’ll All Be Here Forever), and first standard vinyl release, the album shot to No. 3 on the Billboard 200 and hit No. 1 on Top Rock & Alternative Albums, Top Alternative Albums and Americana/Folk Albums, and with the Post Malone-featuring bonus track “Dial Drunk,” Kahan earned his first Billboard Hot 100 entry.
The following year was a whirlwind. Kahan was nominated for best new artist at the 2024 Grammy Awards; released another deluxe set, Stick Season (Forever), featuring star collaborators including Post, Kacey Musgraves, Hozier, Gracie Abrams and Brandi Carlile on already released tracks, which helped bump the original album to a new No. 2 peak on the Billboard 200; and that summer sold out Boston’s Fenway Park, then his biggest show to date, on his massive, 85-date We’ll All Be Here Forever Tour.
By that time, he was spent. He’d been on the road for two years and living within an album cycle that extended far beyond what anyone, Kahan included, had anticipated. Stick Season had catapulted him to a level of fame that felt daunting, and as he returned home (he splits time between Nashville and Vermont), it left him contemplating its impact on himself, his creative process and everyone around him.
advertisement
He chronicled that dizzying aftermath in the surprisingly vulnerable Netflix documentary, Noah Kahan: Out of Body, released this March and directed by Nick Sweeney. It set the stage for The Great Divide’s arrival a month later, laying bare the complicated familial relationships he examines in great detail on the album. And in the end, Kahan’s 2026 looked a bit like his 2024 — only even bigger. Because this time, he and his team were braced for impact.
The Great Divide — including its 21-track deluxe edition, The Last of the Bugs, which arrived mere hours after the original album’s release — scored Kahan the biggest week of his career, earning 389,000 equivalent album units in the United States the week ending April 30, according to Luminate. And on this stadiums-only tour, every stop was as big as Fenway.
“I’ve never been proud of anything I made the way I’m proud of this album,” Kahan admits. “It was so hard to make and I was so worried about it. The fans knew how much anxiety I had around [it]. To see them just be like, ‘Dude, we know what you went through. Relax, we like it’ — it was like I’d already been accepted, and I didn’t know that they were going to keep me around if I wouldn’t release something great. And to [feel] like, yes, they’re fans of my music, but they also seem to be rooting for the creative journey, made me really proud. Knowing that they’re there for whatever that looks like for me made me feel like maybe I’ll have a long career — longer career — than I thought.”
advertisement
Bode jacket, shirt, and pants.Emman Montalvan
In the spring of 2025, Kahan and his manager Simmons, a partner at Foundations (home also to Chappell Roan, Laufey and Slayyyter), intentionally went one month without speaking. It was the longest they had gone since meeting each other.
“There was a period where I was like, ‘I acknowledge that we are friends and we are partners, but I also embody the pressures of your career — please step away from that,’ ” Simmons says. “I think it was really helpful for him to get the approval to just ignore the pressure for a while and go live his life. And he came back from that moment with a different energy.”
Since signing him to Republic, Adelson — who is now president/COO of Mercury Records, the REPUBLIC Collective label that he relaunched with Tyler Arnold in 2022 and that Kahan transitioned to ahead of Stick Season — has emphasized that artist development, at any point in a career, requires time. “We’ve always worked with him,” Adelson says. “When he wanted to make Stick Season in Vermont, I was like, ‘Go ahead, let’s see what happens.’ And this last album was, ‘It’s a big record, there’s a lot at stake. You don’t have to release music in 2025 — let’s make sure it’s great.’ Giving him that time and space, even from the beginning, to find where he wants to go and what inspires him and how he wants to get there — for us, it’s just trusting our artists.”
Instead of releasing music last year, Kahan stretched his time crafting The Great Divide (he also married his longtime partner, Brenna Nolan, after proposing in 2023). He reteamed with collaborator Gabe Simon, with whom he made Stick Season, but also welcomed a new producer into his fold: Aaron Dessner of The National, who has produced projects for stars like Taylor Swift and Gracie Abrams. In December 2024, Kahan took a solo trip to Dessner’s storied Long Pond studio in upstate New York.
“I think when he came to me he was nervous,” Dessner recalls. “And he said before he got here over text and then again when he arrived, ‘Dude, I think we’re just going to hang out.’ What came out fairly quickly was ‘Porch Light’ and that line, ‘Whatever made you famous made you sick.’ You could feel that he was reckoning with this stratospheric success and the feeling of just running on fumes that comes with endless touring and the adulation and thousands of people staring at you. It can make you feel out of body, which I can relate to, this feeling of, ‘Who am I, actually?’ I just think he was in a bit of a strange place … he wanted to write a new record, but there was real unease about that. And he was finally able to settle in and really give voice to it, which he does on all these songs.”
One of the first that helped the album click was its title track. (Kahan had teased “The Great Divide” on tour in 2024, but in Simon’s estimation, they reworked it 25 to 30 times over the next year.) “I think what I was struggling with between Stick Season and The Great Divide is, ‘How do I not just do the same thing?’ ” Kahan says. “I’m still really interested in Vermont and New England and my family, and I realized that there are so many stories within stories and layers within layers, and every moment is massive and magnificent no matter how small it feels. I learned that throughthe ‘Great Divide’writing process.”
Simmons adds that while the song was never identified as the album’s lead single during the creative process, it became “an axis this album’s storyline was going to revolve around.” By summer 2025, more of that story had come into focus and upon hearing some demos, a familiar feeling washed over Adelson. “He f–king did it. We’re going to be good.’ ”
Simon recalls going to sequence the album with Kahan and listening with fresh ears after taking a bit of a break. “He and I looked at each other like, ‘It’s pretty good.’ Noah and I actually left with smiles on our faces.”
Found shirt, Todd Snyder pants.Emman Montalvan
Kahan admits to having a hard time describing his own sound, and with The Great Divide, he leaned into that ambiguity. “We explored different parts of music that we love so that way we don’t ever feel like we’re boxed into something,” he says. “It can be confusing for people, but I think storytelling is my favorite way to describe the music. That’s my total intention: to try to tell stories.”
That storytelling, mind you, is so intricate that Kahan and Simon mapped it out SVU-style on a whiteboard. It’s why Adelson compares the album to “a great book that you want to read over and over again … Even for myself, it provokes memories and makes you think of your own life and your own world.”
Upon its April release, all 21 songs from The Great Divide: The Last of the Bugs charted on the Hot 100, making Kahan just the 13th artist in the chart’s 68-year history to enter at least as many songs simultaneously. Of those entries, 13 reached the top 40. “The Great Divide” had previously debuted and peaked at No. 6, earning Kahan his highest-charting hit to date. It topped Adult Alternative Airplay for 11 weeks, the most by any song since 2017.
That commercial dominance could set him up for a big night at the Grammy Awards next February. After competing for best new artist just two years ago, with The Great Divide and its title track Kahan is a serious contender for album, song and record of the year nominations — not to mention any other rock, folk and pop nods he may get. Acknowledging his own ambition — while joining the ranks of such smaller circles — is something Kahan is still getting used to. Even landing the lead single for the Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping soundtrack, the haunting and emotive “Draw You Out” (which he co-wrote and co-produced with Dessner) puts him in the elite company of just Taylor Swift, Lorde, Coldplay and Olivia Rodrigo, who have all written flagship songs for the blockbuster franchise — and could even land him an Academy Award nomination (“F–k it, I want that EGOT,” he says with a laugh).
His sold-out stadium run, which began in June, was also a wake-up call to precisely what kind of “a strange mountain we’re on.” He realized, “You start to not have a ton of people that have done some of these venues before, and that’s not to say it in an arrogant way. It’s just like, there’s nine people who have played this place before, and half of them are Paul McCartney. Sometimes I have a hard time finding people who have gone through this. But I have had conversations with some legends that have been at the stadium level before, knowing the demands that come with that, and it’s been really helpful.” (He’s now one of only four acts who’ve been inducted into the Fenway Music Hall of Fame, along with Billy Joel, Zac Brown Band and, yes, McCartney.)
Despite playing to the biggest crowds of his career, Kahan has managed to maintain a rare level of accessibility. He admits to being a “big Twitter guy” largely because of how funny he finds his fans and how much he loves engaging with them through humor. “I feel like there’s a roast-y element to them, and that’s how I interact with people, [having grown] up in a big family with a lot of funny people, never taking anything too seriously,” he says. “You’ll see on my Twitter, it’s me literally talking about my butt and then me tweeting out lyrics that are so depressing. The f–king emotional whiplash is crazy. I do think that’s how I live and how I exist — and my fans are all about it.
“But I also think they’re really open with each other — again, not to toot my own horn,” he continues, “because there’s a lot of transparency from me about mental health on Twitter and Instagram and I’m always updating people with how I’m doing. Or you can just tell from some of the tweets that maybe I’m not doing great at some points. The amount of conversations I have with people now who come up to me and they’re like, ‘My antidepressants have got me feeling this weird side effect.’ That is not an easy conversation to have. At least it wasn’t for me … And what I see at the shows are people legitimately in stages of joy and grief and all these different feelings coming out at once, and it’s so f–king awesome. That’s why I go to therapy, to experience that kind of feeling.”
Throughout the tour so far, he also used Twitter to announce each night’s surprise song — an idea he got from Taylor Swift. “I only went to one of the Eras Tour shows but it just adds something that makes each city feel like it’s getting a special moment. And I did have two albums before Stick Season, and people are fans of those albums. Sometimes I remember that my career isn’t 5 years old. I’ve been here 10 years almost.”
And with that decade of hard work, Simmons says Kahan has earned a new kind of agency over his career and what comes next.
“We want to give him the space to not have to tour this album forever and instead, on his own terms, determine when the end date is of that promotional cycle,” Simmons says. “He doesn’t have to operate on a timeline that is dictated to him … he’s arrived at the place where he can dictate that for his career, which is amazing.”
Todd Snyder shirt.Emman Montalvan
"My mom, when I was a little kid, was like, ‘You’re going to get a Grammy someday,’ ” Kahan recalls. “I was like, ‘Shut up, mom. No way.’ ”
He was always interested in awards shows and loved watching the Grammys, Oscars and Emmys as much for the performances as for the comedic monologues. By the time he got his first nomination, for best new artist, it was a moment he and his always supportive mother had both spent a lot of time thinking about, “which is so weird,” Kahan says. “You’re in New Hampshire when you’re 11 years old, so far away from the Grammys, but for some reason we were both like, ‘That would be really cool.’ ”
He recalls the first time he saw a Grammy up close at producer Joel Little’s home studio during one of their early recording sessions in L.A. “I would f–king tiptoe by it so I didn’t knock it over,” Kahan says. Yet, as he soon learned firsthand, actually being at the awards show and competing for a trophy of his own would stir up a complicated set of emotions.
“You’re on a red carpet, there’s famous people everywhere. You literally feel like you’re at Madame Tussauds,” he says with a laugh. “There’s famous people legit everywhere. And they’re super cool and you can go talk to them and s–t. Then the seat-filler people think you’re famous and you’re like, ‘Dude, I think I’m a seat-filler too.’ ”
It’s an experience he wrote about in earnest detail on the contemplative “Orbiter,” a fan favorite and one of the four Last of the Bugs bonus tracks that became an unexpected hit, performing especially well on TikTok, where it’s soundtracked over 5.5 million clips and counting. “It was the first song I wrote after a long period of not connecting with music and really not feeling a lot of inspiration or truth in what I was thinking or feeling,” Kahan says. Its first verse in particular describes his initial Grammys experience: “It’s not my first time bitter, drunk on a red carpet/Or my first time losing, and it won’t be my last … California’s so much more than some awards show.” (For the record, Victoria Monét won that year.)
“Who the f–k thinks that’s relatable to Joe Schmo in Randomville? But who would’ve thought Vermont would be so relatable to the global marketplace?” Simon asks. “He has this way of being able to communicate these ideas that you and I might never ever experience, and yet you feel it. That’s a gift. That’s Mark Twain, Aaron Sorkin-level writing.”
Kahan says “Orbiter” is about a feeling that extends beyond awards shows, one that has followed him throughout his career, “of being on the outside of a moment is the best way to put it. To feel like not belonging anywhere and being with the people that feel like the moon to me, that feel like they are always there and always someone I can look to and feel like even if I don’t belong right here, I know I belong with you.”
Going back to when he was playing open mics, “I was always the youngest one and I always felt like I was the worst. And then when I got to Nashville, I had a record deal and all my friends went to college, and that was disorienting. And then when I got to New York, it was the same s–t. Everyone was always busy. I’m like, ‘How do you have things to do?’ ” Even after the success of Stick Season, “I felt completely out of my depth. I never feel in place anywhere, really. Not in a sad way, but I always feel like I’m a little bit somewhere else, and those people in my life — my wife, my mom, the fans — have been the constants and have been things that I can always look to.
“The Grammys experience was overwhelming,” he continues. ”I was so honored to be nominated and I am really excited to get a chance to go and see all the people in L.A. and do that again.” He lets out a bit of an anxious sigh. “And I don’t know what’ll happen, obviously, but I’m excited — it hasn’t scarred me. I think if anything, I’m trying to grow past the feeling I have in that song. It would be nice if I could feel more deserving of experiences. I’m still grappling a lot with what that song means to me.”
The Great Divide album cycle, in fact, kicked off during the awards show this year. Like SZA and Lady Gaga before him, Kahan landed Mastercard’s coveted cinematic Grammys commercial for the album’s lead single and title track. It was an appealing move, says Simmons, who had seen the “pedigree” of the spot.
Todd Snyder shirt and pants, Marc Nolan shoes.Emman Montalvan
“As we’re on the front side of an album cycle, particularly one with expectations like this, it’s always like, ‘What is going to help us cut through the noise and give us a platform to represent this art and this story in a way that would feel the most accurate to what the artist wants?’ ” Simmons says. “Mastercard was really open to designing this in a way that could highlight the aspects of this album and song that were really important to Noah: the narrative of masculinity and male relationships and the death of friendships and the guilt that comes with leaving your earlier existence and going off to have a worldly experience that your friends aren’t having. That’s really nuanced and you wouldn’t think that that would be something that a major brand would be willing to entertain as a priority. And, you know, being able to reveal it [during] the Grammys, we got so many eyeballs on it.”
Having only scored two prior nominations (the other was a 2025 nod for best country duo/group performance with Kelsea Ballerini on “Cowboys Cry Too”), Kahan could soon join yet another exclusive group of artists. While it’s somewhat common for a best new artist nominee to land an album of the year nod years later, it’s rarer to lose best new artist and go on to win album — only seven artists in Grammys history have done so.
“He’s become one of the artists that culture builds around, and that really wasn’t established earlier on,” Simmons says. “The level of exposure and success of Stick Season multiplied with The Great Divide album cycle has crystallized that. I think he has become one of those artists that helps to define modern music.” (His influence is now scattered across the charts, from rising folk-pop artists like Alyssa Grace and Buffalo Traffic Jam to country singer Stella Lefty, whose credited interpolation of “Stick Season” has helped her hit “Boston” reach No. 2 on the Hot 100.)
Kahan’s own influences skew a bit older. Asked who he’d wish to perform with if he was chosen for one of the Grammys’ signature pairings of a modern star with an icon, his top picks include Cat Stevens (“doing ‘Father and Son’ or ‘Peace Train’ would be incredible”), Paul Simon, Graham Nash and Counting Crows’ Adam Duritz.
His admiration for Simon in particular is what made his Emmys In Memoriam performance such an obvious “yes,” Simmons says. “The opportunities have become more vast and wider-reaching, but it almost feels like our focus is even further narrowed in that Noah is one of the best songwriters making music right now and we just have to give him opportunities to show that,” he says. “Because it was a Paul Simon song, who is one of Noah’s biggest inspirations and also one of the greatest songwriters on the planet, any time we can put him in the category of other world-class songwriters it just feels like he’s starting to really fit in and be at home there. I think he’s starting to believe it himself now, which is a really beautiful thing to see.”
Kahan’s current dreams are less career-focused and lean more into, as he says, “basic caveman stuff” — like running a 5K in under 24 minutes and cooking healthier. And while he does have a couple of songs he’s working on — “I’ve thought about doing concept things, and I have a couple weird ideas rolling around about local s–t, but nothing substantial yet” — he says he’s starting to become a little too comfortable thinking about what’s ahead, joking that “I need to start freaking out.”
He usually starts writing again in the winter, when it becomes “f–king miserable” outside — and he might already have next summer spoken for as well. But after teasing a potential 2027 outing during his final North American show on Aug. 31, he won’t clarify anything just yet. “One thing I never did on the last tour was live in the moment,” he says, “and I’m trying to live in the moment as much as I can.”
Bode jacket, shirt, and pants.Emman Montalvan
Noah Kahan photographed on September 2, 2026 at the Thomas W. Phillips Residence in Los Angeles.
Styling by Elliott Taylor
Grooming by Amanda Wilson. Set Design by Peter Gueracague.
advertisement
Popular
advertisement