Four German shepherds — Penny, Oma, Meadow and Poncho — came bounding out of a house that sits on a hilltop in central Vermont. They sniffed out the approaching stranger before deciding to grant passage. Noah Kahan, a 26-year-old singer-songwriter who became an unlikely sensation this year, emerged from the house and corralled the pack with a series of gentle commands.
“Sorry about the dogs,” he said in a soft voice. “They can be rambunctious.”
He was dressed in dark jeans, sturdy boots and a white sherpa overshirt that contrasted with his long dark hair and beard. Standing on the muddy driveway against a backdrop of snowy mountains and gray skies, he looked every bit his image as pop music’s latest sensitive woodsman.
Mr. Kahan had just returned from Britain, where he had wrapped up a tour, to spend some time with his parents, who are divorced and live on adjoining properties spread across more than 100 acres of rugged land. In a few days, he was scheduled to perform on “Saturday Night Live” for the first time.
“It’s kind of overwhelming and scary,” he said.
Eight years after Mr. Kahan signed a record deal as a high school senior, his third album, “Stick Season,” has made him the next big thing. It reached No. 1 on the Billboard rock and alternative album charts this year and earned him a Grammy nomination for best new artist.
Even in Strafford (population 1,075), he couldn’t escape the machinery of his newfound fame. Two publicists from his record label had driven up from New York to watch over the interview and photo shoot.
“Stick Season,” which was released last year, is awash in acoustic guitars, banjo, mandolin and Mr. Kahan’s tenor voice, which alternates between plaintive and really plaintive. Lyrically, the album is filled with specific references to growing up in New England. “Forgive my Northern attitude,” Mr. Kahan sings on “Northern Attitude. “Oh, I was raised out in the cold.”
As for the album’s title, Mr. Kahan said he heard the phrase spoken by old-time Vermonters and borrowed it. Stick season is the barren period between fall and winter in New England — “this really miserable time of year when it’s just kind of gray and cold, and there’s no snow yet, and the beauty of the foliage is done,” as he told the lyrics site Genius.
Matching his rootsy sound and style, his fans wear flannel to his concerts, even in 90-degree heat. The shows have become emotionally charged revivals; teenagers cry, along with their chaperones. But after all the touring and meeting people and collaborations with everyone from Kacey Musgraves to Post Malone, he seemed a little burned out.
“I’m also so tired that even right now, driving down to New York to go do ‘S.N.L.,’ I’m, like, ugh,” he said. “I think when I’m there, I’ll process it and be, like, ‘Oh, my God, what an opportunity.’”
The plan for this late November day was to go on a walk in the woods on his parents’ properties in Strafford, where he holed up during the pandemic. In his father’s barn and his mother’s living room, he wrote the melancholy, pop-folk anthems that became “Stick Season” and, to hear him tell it, revived his stalled career.
It had snowed the night before — one of those wet snows that aren’t good for skiing or much else, Mr. Kahan pointed out. He trudged along a path that led through the woods and up a mountainside, leaving the two publicists far behind. “It’s no longer stick season,” he said. “But it’s still depressing. Until we get some real snow.” His dog Penny, who goes on tour with him, and her sister, Oma, ran at his heels, grabbing fallen branches to play fetch.
Mr. Kahan is not a swaggering pop star. He favors ambivalence and often expresses himself in the language of self-care. He titled his debut album “Busyhead” in a nod to his anxieties and the years he had spent in therapy. He started a charity, the Busyhead Project, to raise money and awareness for affordable access to mental-health care.
In person, he comes across as intelligent and introspective. Every so often, he brightens, revealing a wicked humor, as when his father suddenly appeared riding a snow machine with aggressively large track tires and Mr. Kahan called it “the world’s most distracting vehicle.”
Describing his recent concerts in London, Mr. Kahan said he was amazed to see audiences singing along with lyrics about life in Strafford, which is little more than a town hall, a post office, a simple church and a dozen or so clapboard homes clustered around a village green.
There isn’t a restaurant or bar for miles. The main gathering spot is Coburns’ General Store in South Strafford, which sells deli sandwiches, groceries, gas, ammunition, hardware supplies and liquor. There’s also a branch of Mascoma Bank in a little kiosk inside the store. Mr. Kahan’s fans have lately been showing up there, asking to take selfies with Melvin Coburn, the proprietor, whose voice can be heard on his song “The View Between Villages.”
“They’re singing about specific roads in a town that no one in New England knows about, let alone people in London,” Mr. Kahan said of his recent audiences.
At one concert, overcome by a wave of feeling, he smashed a guitar to pieces onstage. Afterward, he wondered what had gone into his sudden outburst.
“I’ve never done that before,” he said. “But I was seeing, like, when I was smashing a guitar — man, am I an angry person?”
Returning to this remote part of Vermont calms him, he said.
He spent his earliest years in Strafford, before the family moved to nearby Hanover, N.H. His father worked as an information technologist and his mother was in publishing. About 25 years ago, they bought the property in Strafford, and the family would often spend weekends there. Mr. Kahan and his three siblings gathered around a fire and slept in a camper while their father cleared the land to build a house. The Kahans moved back to Strafford full time when Noah was in high school.
“All these trails — my dad cut all these trees down and built this huge trail system,” Mr. Kahan said. “You can walk around all day and still be on my property.”
He came to a fork. Nailed to a tree were signs that announced the diverging paths, Swoop and Bypass. Mr. Kahan chuckled, saying that his father had gone on a naming spree. “We’ve lived here forever,” he said. “Why is it called Swoop?”
He chose the trail that cut straight up the hillside. Halfway up, he was panting. “Sorry I’m so out of breath, dude,” he said. “I’m hunched over a guitar. And drinking I.P.A.s.”
From the summit, he took in the view of New Hampshire’s White Mountains in the distance. The two-story house where his father lives stood in the clearing, along with the barn. “I grew up lucky as hell for all this,” Mr. Kahan said. “The amount of space you get up here.”
“Dead quiet,” he continued. “Lonely as hell. During the pandemic, oh, my God, there would be weeklong periods where I would find myself talking to the dogs.”
Two years after writing “Stick Season,” Mr. Kahan seemed nostalgic for the pre-fame days when he was back home and feeling adrift, making music that connected with others in the same position. Each week, as he workshopped his songs, he would post them on Instagram and TikTok.
“Those were the days, man,” he said.
He is nervous about recording a follow-up to “Stick Season,” he said.
“This album has been such a special and beautiful world to live in, that the idea of coming up with what’s next is kind of scary for me,” Mr. Kahan said. “It’s not even about having success. It’s about feeling the same way that I did. I’ve been waiting for that feeling to come again.”
Mr. Kahan’s earlier music, which he made while living in Nashville and New York, showed a gift for songwriting, but it didn’t call much attention to itself. As he put it, “I was an unknown singer-songwriter in a sea of white-guy singer-songwriters.”
Stuck at home in 2021, and unsure if he would perform again, he began to write in a more personal way about the place he was from. He turned Strafford into his version of Steinbeck’s Salinas Valley.
He name-checked Alger Brook Road, his childhood address, and sang, “I’m mean because I grew up in New England.” He wrote about the love and hate he had for small-town life: the appreciation of history and community, the frustration with the lack of opportunity, the feeling of being left behind when your friends leave.
Rebecca Jennings, a native Vermonter who is a senior correspondent for Vox, described in a recent essay the pull of Mr. Kahan’s music, especially for New Englanders whose region is typically nowheresville in terms of national pop culture.
“On a drive up to Vermont in early October,” she wrote, “at the peak of the red-gold foliage we’re famous for, Kahan’s biggest hit of the moment, ‘Dial Drunk,’ comes on and suddenly I’m crying, missing the home I had and the family who’ve since moved out.”
Mr. Kahan is now so beloved in Vermont, and New England generally, that people joke that he is bigger than Bernie Sanders. When visitors search their iPhones for local food options, they are served a list titled “Noah Kahan’s New England Spots.” Beneath a photo of Mr. Kahan superimposed over distant mountains, addresses appear for some of his favorite restaurants, bars, cafes and bakeries in New Hampshire and Vermont.
“I didn’t realize that was going to be on everyone’s app,” Mr. Kahan said. “Gusanoz is my favorite restaurant in the area. The guys there are, like, ‘Dude, we have people from Ohio coming up to eat here.’ I got all my spots on there.”
A merchandising company approached him about making a Stick Season candle, “inspired by Noah’s experiences in rural Vermont.” He wanted it to smell of rotting leaves or diesel engines; the end result was pine trees and whiskey.
He also collaborated with a Connecticut brewing company to release “Noah Kahan’s Northern Attitude IPA.” And the Maine clothing company L.L. Bean offers a Stick Season Collection by Noah Kahan. It includes an anorak, a wool shirt and a reversible coat for dogs.
The trail cut through his father’s place and went back down the mountain. Mr. Kahan caught his breath as he returned to the flat ground near his mother’s house. In her backyard was a screened gazebo. Inside it, taking up the whole interior, there was a bed on a wooden frame.
“My mom would come out here and sleep sometimes,” Mr. Kahan said. “It’s actually wicked cozy in here. In the summertime, it’s dope. You hear the crickets.”
He motioned to the blue tarp covering the bed.
“We can take it off and sit on the mattress, if you want,” he said.
As we sat on the bed in the cold and the quiet, gazing out at the snow-covered mountains, Mr. Kahan talked about how he had signed a record deal while still a teenager and moved to Nashville. How he had discovered that the reality of the music industry was very different from his dream of it. How he had struggled to figure out who he was as an artist. And how he had ended up back in Strafford.
“I love feeling like there’s a place that hasn’t been touched by the rest of the world,” he said. “You can drive past the green and you’ll see buildings that have been there for hundreds of years.”
A little more than a month after his “Saturday Night Live” appearance, Mr. Kahan will be leaving again for another world tour. It ends in July 2024 with two shows at Fenway Park in Boston that are already sold out.
“I’m going to come back here as soon as I can,” he said.
He added that he would like to purchase some property, ideally right nearby.
“My goal is to live as close to my parents as possible,” Mr. Kahan said. “Be able to snowmobile down and stop at my mom’s for a beer. I’d be happy to spend the rest of my life here.”
Source: Music - nytimes.com
