Noah Kahan, the songwriter who took Vermont’s word for the bare weeks before snow to No. 1

Noah Kahan

Photo: POPDUST / CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	January 1, 1997 Strafford
Occupation	Singer
Awards	Grammy nomination — Best New Artist · Grammy nomination — Best Country Duo/Group Performance · iHeartRadio Music Award — Best New Artist Alternative or Rock · SoundExchange Hall of Fame Award for Stick Season

In New England there is a name for the weeks after Halloween and before the first snow that stays: stick season. The leaves are down, the ground is brown, the tourists have gone home, and the trees are bare branches against a grey sky. Noah Kahan wrote a song about it in 2020, during what he later described as a bout of insecurity, and he worried that something so specifically about his home state would mean nothing anywhere else. Four years later “Stick Season” was the first number one of 2024 on the UK Singles Chart, then number one in Australia, Ireland and the Netherlands. It has since been certified six times platinum in Britain, ten times platinum in Australia, Diamond in Canada and four times platinum in the United States. It turned out that almost nobody needs to have lived in Vermont to know that feeling.

Noah Berkenkamp Kahan was born on January 1, 1997, in Strafford, Vermont, the third of four children, and grew up on a tree farm. His father, Josh Kahan, taught him guitar. His mother, Lauri Berkenkamp, a writer of parenting guides, taught him how to write. His father is Jewish and his mother Christian, and Kahan has said that his Jewish roots are a large part of his identity. He was writing songs by the age of eight and got his first guitar at ten. Around twelve he was fronting a band called the Bloodthirsties through a local music program, Tuck’s Rock Dojo. At Hanover High School, just over the state line in New Hampshire, he played varsity soccer and posted original songs to SoundCloud and YouTube. That was enough to build a small online following before he had released anything official.

The songs had a subject from the start. Kahan has spoken openly for years about living with anxiety, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder and body dysmorphia. He talks about it in interviews, on stage and in the kind of self-deprecating social media posts that became part of his public voice. His trick has never been to dramatise the condition. He describes it in the flat, specific language of someone who has had to explain it to himself many times. That plainness is the thread that runs from his teenage uploads to stadium choruses.

The industry came calling early. After touring with the German band Milky Chance, he signed with Republic Records in 2017, at nineteen, and began moving between New York, Los Angeles and Nashville. The first records reflected that geography. “Hurt Somebody”, with Julia Michaels, and a feature on Quinn XCII’s “Tough” in 2018 placed him in a polished pop lane. His debut album, Busyhead, arrived in 2019. It was good and it found listeners. It did not yet sound like the place he came from.

The pandemic sent him home. Back in Vermont he wrote the EP Cape Elizabeth in a single week and released it in May 2020. He later admitted on TikTok that its song “Maine” was the only song of his he regularly listened to. His second album, I Was / I Am, came out on September 17, 2021, and produced no mainstream hit. At that point Kahan was a respected, mid-sized singer-songwriter with a devoted audience and no obvious next step.

The next step came in fragments. Since 2020 he had been posting short snippets of unfinished songs online, and in 2022 a TikTok verse of what would become “Stick Season” spread so quickly that he had to finish the song. The single came out on July 8, 2022, and the album Stick Season, produced with Gabe Simon, followed on October 14, 2022. The record is built on banjo, acoustic guitar and lyrics full of real local detail: the town you swear you will leave, the friends who stayed, the cold coming in. It debuted at number 14 on the Billboard 200, his first appearance on that chart, and then refused to leave. It reached number two on the chart dated March 16, 2024, nearly eighteen months after release. It spent 45 weeks in the top ten, and the title track reached number nine on the Billboard Hot 100 that April.

What kept the album alive was a strategy that looked, in retrospect, like a stress test. Kahan kept reissuing the same songs with other voices on them. Stick Season (We’ll All Be Here Forever) in June 2023 added seven tracks, including an extended “The View Between Villages”. Then came the collaborations: “Dial Drunk” with Post Malone, “Call Your Mom” with Lizzy McAlpine, “She Calls Me Back” with Kacey Musgraves, “Northern Attitude” with Hozier, “Everywhere, Everything” with Gracie Abrams and “Homesick” with Sam Fender. Stick Season (Forever), released on February 9, 2024, gathered them with new versions featuring Brandi Carlile (“You’re Gonna Go Far”) and Gregory Alan Isakov (“Paul Revere”). Each guest pulled the songs toward a different audience: Hozier’s literary gloom, Musgraves’s country, Fender’s working-town Britain. Each time the Vermont detail held. He also appeared on “Sarah’s Place” from Zach Bryan’s Boys of Faith EP, which peaked at number 14 on the Hot 100.

Recognition followed the numbers. TIME put him on its TIME100 Next list in 2023. At the 66th Grammy Awards, in 2024, he was nominated for Best New Artist, the same year he won Best New Artist in the alternative and rock field at the iHeartRadio Music Awards and Top Rock Album for Stick Season at the Billboard Music Awards. The title song was nominated for International Song at the Brit Awards in both 2024 and 2025. “Cowboys Cry Too”, his duet with Kelsea Ballerini, earned a CMA nomination for Musical Event of the Year and a nomination for Best Country Duo/Group Performance at the 67th Grammys. In August 2024 he released Live From Fenway Park, and in 2025 he played Glastonbury.

Kahan also turned his subject into an institution. In May 2023 he launched The Busyhead Project, a mental health initiative named after his debut album. It funds community-based organisations and works to reduce the stigma around seeking help. Vermont Governor Phil Scott proclaimed September 19, 2024, Noah Kahan’s Busyhead Project Day. In 2025 Kahan added Folk & Fairways, a benefit concert and golf tournament at Spruce Peak in Stowe. The first edition raised $1 million. The second, in September 2026, raised $3 million, and by then the project had raised more than $13 million since its launch.

His personal life has stayed close to the same geography. He has been with Brenna Nolan since at least 2014. They got engaged in Cabo San Lucas on July 17, 2023, and married on August 23, 2025, in a private ceremony in Strafford. The couple have lived in Nashville, in Watertown, Massachusetts, and back in Vermont.

Here is the honest critical reading of where Kahan stood going into 2026. Stick Season was a record of restraint: tight arrangements, precise language, and a refusal of production grandeur that felt earned rather than chosen. Its success created an appetite for something bigger and more theatrical than anything he had made. The follow-up had to answer whether he could work at stadium scale without losing the specificity that had filled the stadiums in the first place.

Part of the answer arrived before the music did. Noah Kahan: Out of Body, a documentary directed by Nick Sweeney, premiered at South by Southwest in March 2026. There it won the 24 Beats Per Second Audience Award, and Netflix released it on April 13, 2026. The film follows Kahan in the period after Stick Season as he works on its successor. It does not look away from the parts of that process that were not going well.

He announced The Great Divide on January 28, 2026, released the title track two days later and followed it with “Porch Light” on March 13, which reached number 20 on the Hot 100. The album came out on April 24, 2026, on Mercury Records. He produced it with Gabe Simon and Aaron Dessner of The National, and they recorded at Long Pond in the Hudson Valley, Guilford Sound in Vermont, Fire Tower Farm in Only, Tennessee, and Gold Pacific in Nashville. The standard edition runs 17 tracks and 77 minutes, and an extended edition, The Last of the Bugs, brings it to 21. Kahan has described the songs as being about his now more complicated relationships with family and friends, and about the silences that build up between people.

The numbers made the stadium question sound small. The Great Divide debuted at number one on the Billboard 200, his first, with 389,000 equivalent album units, 175,000 of them in pure sales. That was the biggest week for a rock album since Billboard began measuring by units at the end of 2014. It stayed at number one for three weeks and also topped the charts in the UK, Australia, Canada, Germany, Ireland, New Zealand and Switzerland. All 21 of its songs charted on the Hot 100 at the same time, which made Kahan only the 13th act in the chart’s history to place at least 21 songs at once. The reviews split along a predictable line. Rolling Stone gave it four and a half stars and called him a rock star now. Pitchfork, at 6.2, found it simply too long.

The Great Divide Tour, his first stadium tour, opened in Orlando on June 11, 2026. The emotional peak came in Boston. On July 7, 8, 10 and 11 he became the first performer ever to sell out four nights at Fenway Park, playing to more than 151,000 people. At the final show his mother, Lauri Berkenkamp, came out to announce his induction into the Fenway Music Hall of Fame. He was only the fourth artist to receive it, after Billy Joel, Paul McCartney and the Zac Brown Band. In Queens, Aaron Dessner joined him for “End of August”. After the North American leg closed with two nights in Seattle, where he hinted at a summer 2027 return, the tour moved on to Australia and New Zealand. Rod Laver Arena in Melbourne sold out for its run of shows in late September. The tour continues through the UK and Ireland in November, then mainland Europe, and ends in Paris on December 7, 2026.

In between, on September 14, 2026, he played the In Memoriam segment at the Emmy Awards at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles. He sang Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water” with his guitar and an orchestra. The show’s executive producer, Jesse Collins, said Kahan chose the song himself because it meant something to him personally. Paul Simon is one of his stated heroes, alongside Cat Stevens, Counting Crows, Mumford & Sons and Green Day, and the choice said without any announcement where Kahan places himself: in the long line of American songwriters who made one small place stand for everyone’s.

That is the story so far. A boy from a Vermont tree farm wrote about the ugliest weeks of the year in his valley, and millions of people who had never seen it recognised their own home. Now he has to do it again, bigger, without losing the valley.