Noah Kahan Makes an Unlikely Home-Town Hero
In 2023, Noah Kahan, a singer and songwriter from Strafford, Vermont, leapfrogged to superstardom following the release of “Stick Season,” a COVID-era LP full of claustrophobic, lovesick folk songs. Kahan has a soft, nasal voice—more Simon than Garfunkel—and he uses it to eulogize relationships that falter for reasons both intentional and incidental. If its instrumentation were just slightly more askew, “Stick Season” could have easily been released on the indie label Sub Pop in the mid-to-late two-thousands, wedged somewhere in between the Shins and the Head and the Heart—its sound is something like a peppier Fleet Foxes, if Robin Pecknold had been reared on Counting Crows instead of Vashti Bunyan. Instead, Kahan occupies a funny spot in the pop-music cosmos—music for people who own too much performance fleece to embrace the bombast of Taylor Swift but aren’t quite feral enough for the cacophony of Geese. It’s the kind of thing that sounds really nice in a Subaru, on your way to work, with an iced coffee nestled in the cup holder.
Yet Kahan’s voice is also an unusually good vessel for ache: “I ain’t proud of all the punches that I’ve thrown / In the name of someone I no longer know,” he sings on “Dial Drunk,” a song about clinging, somewhat frantically, to an expired emergency contact. “Now I know your name, but not who you are,” he laments on “All My Love,” a no-hard-feelings song about an ex. (“If you need me, dear, I’m the same as I was,” he adds on the chorus.) Lyrically, Kahan is preoccupied by the slowness of change, whether it’s the awkward, loping transition between seasons or the equally untidy stretch between a relationship ending and finding peace with what happened. Kahan’s fear of leaving is at least as strong as his fear of being left behind.
He also writes about his home in a way that feels anomalous for the current era, in which pop artists tend to be geographically nonspecific, untethered from place and centered online. Kahan is from the Upper Valley, a quaint and seasonally verdant region encompassing parts of eastern Vermont and western New Hampshire, and sliced through by the Connecticut River—a scenic haven for canoers and for anglers chasing trout. The Upper Valley is perhaps as Platonically New England as an area can get (peeling red barns, rickety covered bridges, green mountains, golden retrievers). “Noah Kahan: Out of Body,” a documentary débuting on Netflix today, explores Kahan’s feelings of belonging, or, more accurately, of misbelonging—to the Upper Valley, largely, but also on stage, within the context of his family, and in his own body.
The film opens just before Kahan plays two sold-out shows at Fenway Park in July of 2024. “I’m so afraid of losing this special thing, like, it might go away,” he says in a voice over. “After all this, what is my purpose? And who am I now?” Though Kahan signed to Republic Records in 2017, it wasn’t until the pandemic, when he started uploading funny, unfinished snippets of songs about Vermont to social media, that he became a phenomenon. Back then, it was still the Wild West days of TikTok, and fame came fast and hard. By all accounts, virality is violent for its subjects, and building a sustainable career from sudden celebrity is a formidable task; any sensible person would be wise to distrust such an instantaneous anointing. When I spoke to Kahan at the very start of 2024, he had recently performed on “S.N.L.,” and had been nominated for a Grammy for Best New Artist. I found him affable, self-effacing, and slightly terrified. “I feel like I’m kind of trying to keep my head above water,” he told me. “Everybody says this, but I truly never imagined in my wildest dreams the level of attention and, frankly, stress that I would be contending with because of this album. I haven’t done a great job of dealing with it,” he added. “I think I’m starting to get a hold of the habits I need to form to handle this. But I have been struggling. It’s just not easy.” The documentary features a scene of Kahan, wielding a golf club and whacking a piñata of himself to smithereens, a kind of not-so-metaphorical ego death: “One-hit-wonder motherfucker! Your music is mid!” he hollers. When Kahan is asked about making a follow-up to “Stick Season,” his voice goes limp with dread. “I’m scared, I’m sad for the next album,” he says. “I’m also acutely aware that nothing will ever be the same.”
At Fenway, Kahan walked onstage with his hair in two tight braids, wearing a Red Sox jersey with the word “FOREVER” on the back. For Kahan, the concept of forever is both balm and devastation, buoy and riptide. It’s present in the way he imagines his career, and crucial to his shifting feelings about home. On “Forever,” a bonus track from an expanded version of “Stick Season,” Kahan sings about the idea of eternity transmutating in the face of new love. (Kahan, who is twenty-nine, proposed to his girlfriend, Brenna Nolan, on a trip to Mexico in 2023—“Maybe the best day of my life,” he says in the film—and they married in Vermont last summer.) Suddenly, too long is not long enough:
Onstage, Kahan likes to joke about generational trauma, and the acrimonious dissolution of his parents’ marriage. “I know it’s really easy to blame yourself,” he offers before “Northern Attitude.” He adds, “I want you to know, without a shadow of a doubt, it is not your fault. It’s your dad’s fault.” Both of Kahan’s parents appear in the film, as well as his three siblings; his mother and father seem to regard their son with a reasonable mix of wonder and apprehension. In “Out of Body,” Kahan frets over his fraught dynamic with his father, who suffered a traumatic brain injury following a grisly bicycle accident. (Kahan was in eighth grade at the time.) “It was a before and an after in our lives,” Kahan remembers. “After the accident, this, like, brilliant guy who was always a little weird and embarrassing and maybe sometimes short-tempered, became slightly more weird, slightly more short-tempered. I feel this guilt about being annoyed by him, being shitty to him . . . I can’t figure out a way to let my dad be who he is.”
Kahan has long been vocal about his issues with anxiety and depression, but in “Out of Body,” he opens up about his disordered eating and body dysmorphia. In one scene, Kahan is at his house in Nashville, packing for a brief tour. “I just want to fit back into my old pants,” he says, tossing clothes in a pile. “There’s a whole shame section of my closet that’s, like, ‘You are too fat for this now.’ Too fat for these, bro.” The morning after a sold-out show at Madison Square Garden, Kahan works out with a trainer. He appears relatably miserable while lunging around the room. “I binge eat a lot of food when I’m feeling stressed, and then I get so hateful about my body and what I look like that I don’t eat for a while,” he says. “I starve myself.” The scrutiny of fame has always been dehumanizing, though the ubiquity of the modern-day comment section has surely accelerated and exaggerated its cruelty. People think “it’s fine to call me ugly,” Kahan says. “You know, I make those jokes myself. But sometimes I want it to stop.”
This month, Kahan will release “The Great Divide,” his fourth album, which was co-produced by Gabe Simon and Aaron Dessner. The early singles suggest a record that’s heavier and more idiosyncratic than his previous work: less of the Mumford & Sons-style stomp-and-clap, more of the spectral dissociation of Bon Iver (Dessner, who has worked extensively with Justin Vernon, is an exciting presence here, giving Kahan’s new songs shadow, depth, and volume). “Porch Light” appears to be narrated from the point of view of Kahan’s mother:
Both of the album’s early singles are concerned with helplessness—what it feels like to love and agonize over someone who is suffering but eschewing intervention. (Powerlessness is an under-discussed sensation in song, though the feeling is instantly familiar to anyone who has ever cared for a person struggling with addiction or certain strains of depression.) On “The Great Divide,” another new single, Kahan writes about his own inability to comfort or protect a wounded friend. “You know I think about you all the time,” he sings in the pre-chorus. “And my deep misunderstanding of your life.” It strikes me as an unusually generous lyric—it’s hard enough to comprehend the contours of another person’s pain, let alone alleviate it.
These days, Kahan might be more tapped into the despair around him than into his own listlessness and confusion, though the central lesson of “Out of Body” is that fame itself is a kind of misery: alienating, relentless, inescapable. “There is no happy ending, or, like, full-circle moment. Or like, there isn’t one event in your life that fixes everything,” Kahan says in the film, while unpacking a toiletry kit in his father’s bathroom, stacking prescription bottles on the counter. “It’s waking up every day and trying.”
Kahan and Nolan recently bought property in Vermont. Nashville felt too industry-laden, too focussed on streaming numbers and other markers of commercial success. “Being up here, it’s like I don’t have to think about music all the time,” he said. The spot that was previously such a font of angst (“The weather ain’t been bad if you’re into masochistic bullshit,” he once sang on “Homesick.”) has now become, ironically, a place of solace and inspiration. Though I suppose that’s always how it goes with home towns—and with all the detritus of our past lives, the old hangouts, the faded friendships, the versions of ourselves we shed along the way. We come to regard them with a funny mix of yearning, trepidation, and respect. The chorus of “The Great Divide” contains a benediction of sorts: “I hope you settle down, I hope you marry rich,” he sings. It’s easy to hear Kahan wishing the same thing for himself, grasping about for a less sensational life, rippled only by quotidian worries. Or, as Kahan puts it, “I hope you’re scared of only ordinary shit.” ♦