My memory of Noah Kahan is friends of mine being excited about him a few years ago. Finally, they said--someone is making pop music about the place we're from. My extended social media circle was buzzing about the prospect. No more would artists from Nashville and LA come down from on high to rap about being the cheer captain on the bleachers, or having Julio get the stretch--they would rap about what it was like to grow up in New Hampshire. I didn't think about it much at the time.
Imagine my surprise when several years later, Noah Kahan's "Khanate" remains in power. We have a Pandora station at work that plays what's popular, and time and time again, I heard some of the same jangly stuff. I realized that I was listening to the same artist in 2025 as had been promised to me. Imagine my surprise, as well, when it turned out that this artist was actually popular during the pandemic. I was listening to someone rant about 'Covid on the planes' in 2025! I was sure this was someone with an axe to grind, but actually it was made at the time when there was definitely Covid on the planes.
Arthur Tiberius Kahan, stage name Noah Kahan, was raised on a tree farm in Vermont. He also went to high school near Lebanon over in New Hampshire, and grew up playing guitar and posting on Soundcloud. After graduating high school he was eventually signed by a major label, and lived alternately on the road and in the NYC-LA vortex for six years before moving home to Vermont during the pandemic.
So the central tension in Kahan's life becomes that pull he feels between wherever the urban musical center of the universe is and his hometown. He comes there sort of against his will, and his ex from high school won't talk to him, he's faced with the fact that everything is brown and cold, that he's stuck 'inside' (much like Robert "Bo" Burnham was), and that the actual environment around him is pretty alienating itself. Things are getting older, and they seemed to have age without his knowing of it. Even his dog died.
When I sat down and read the lyrics for all the songs in his breakout album Stick Season, I was I guess surprised to find that this was actually what he was upset about. Not that these aren't real struggles or not worth writing about, but I thought it was interesting that sprinkling in very, very, sparse references to small-town New England life was enough for people to raise him up as the champion of the region. Seriously, sit down and open Genius, read each song in the album top to bottom. There's like, three songs that feasibly relate to life here. I think some of his strongest lyrics are related to this--when he sings about how a certain road and a certain valley make him feel seventeen again, when he introduces the notion of 'liberal rednecks on a dirt road', and I guess the image of a brown-colored Vermont woods works as well.
The problem is that people from Florida or Ohio or Vermont aren't different species. We are all part of the American monoculture and we all live pretty much the exact same way. This has only been made more true by the internet. People in Vermont like maple syrup, people in Idaho like corn syrup. People in Maine like blueberries, and people in Florida like to leave unsecured firearms in their homes. To the extent that America even has local culture, it's due to self-sorting based on what they see on movies and TV. Did you know that the majority of native Texans are liberals, whereas the majority of Texan transplants are conservatives? The same applies to literally anywhere in the US. The friction that kept people in one place has disappeared. In many ways, the tree farmer Kahan being Soundclouded into a Republic Records deal is a product of this tension. The internet gave him the resources to leave home and join the legions of people who make big cities their home. When he moved back, he realized how little he liked what he saw, and it freaked him out.
So what is the problem with all of that? Well, I think it should actually be possible to write music that is supposed to be from a place and is about a place. I think, if you sit down and think about it deeply, you can find some things you love about the things that surround you and put those things into words. This should be possible, and I think there are great examples of that which have seen moderate success. I think Kahan's counterpart might be Jason Molina, an indie rocker from Ohio who spent his life writing fond and melancholy portrayals of the place he called home and his own personal demons. He says in his song, 'Just Be Simple', that "you'll never hear me talk about one day getting out / why put a new address on the same old loneliness" and that, I think, gets to the core of what I was wanting from Kahan. I want him to tell me what he is feeling and seeing, not just what he is doing. What makes Vermont a special place to you? Who lives there? Why do they stay?
Music that appeals broadly to our cultural malaise is bound to be more popular, for sure, and there probably is a independent version of Kahan floundering in obscurity somewhere that we are unaware of. However, this is the cultural representative these folks are stuck with and I mean to critique him. It is telling that his most recent songwriting effort, a deluxe version of Stick Season, came with a refocusing on contemporary American issues. In his hit song Dial Drunk, a collaboration with Post Malone, he describes the experience of driving drunk, being arrested, and then having his ex not return his single call that the police allowed him. He and Post, the "White Iverson" as he is known as, have finally cracked the code on America's soul and made music that everyone can relate to, which is to say that Americans get an incredible amount of DUIs.