Noah Kahan Fought a Deluge of Doubts to Make His Viral Hit ‘Stick Season’
There were a lot of different doubts swirling around singer-songwriter Noah Kahan’s breakthrough single “Stick Season.” There were doubts about its quality after he first uploaded it to TikTok, doubts about whether anyone outside of Vermont would relate to the song, and doubts about whether he even needed to finish the tune after a lone verse from the brisk folk track caught on.
Kahan reflected on his journey with the song during an interview on Rolling Stone’s Twitch channel back in January. He said the song was borne out of a bout of insecurity, an angsty desire one day to write a verse and upload it to TikTok because “everyone’s using TikTok.” So he penned a verse, uploaded it, and what followed was an all-too-familiar social media anxiety spiral.
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“We all do this — let’s not pretend we don’t do it,” Kahan said with a laugh. “Looking to see if people comment on it, if people are watching it, just refreshing it like an absolute maniac. And no one was, and I was like, ‘Dude, I suck. … It stinks, I suck, I’m the worst!’ I was feeding into the worst thoughts of myself. And then I woke up the next morning, and it had done really well, and I was like, ‘I’m the best, yeah!’”
That burst of success, however, meant Kahan now had to finish the song. “Now I have this bias about how it is — people already said they liked it, so now I don’t feel like I have to force myself to finish the chorus,” he recalled. “It was a really difficult process, and it ended up taking a long time to write.”
On top of that, Kahan said he worried about whether writing so specifically about his home state of Vermont was “going to alienate people” from elsewhere. But when the song was finished and continued to capture the attention of listeners, he was overwhelmed by the responses to its specificity.
“To see it succeed on TikTok and have what seems to be this universal relatability in terms of people making their own lyrics and creating their own storylines was incredible,” Kahan said. “And it was really gratifying to see that I could make something that was specific to my life that could relate to a lot of different people’s lives.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Kahan spoke about the pressures and stresses of social media, getting writing advice from his author mother, and choosing a record deal over college. The appearance also concluded with an in-studio performance that featured renditions of “Maine,” “Homesick,” “Growing Sideways,” and “Stick Season.”
He also spoke, at the time, about working on new songs for the deluxe version of Stick Season, which came out earlier this month.
“I want it to transition into winter — ‘Stick Season’ is like November, and I want the album to deal with themes about winter, which is gonna be more depressing because I get so depressed in wintertime,” Kahan explained. “So I want to lean more into that. It’s really hard to write after all this is happening, to kind of go back and try to be unbiased and not notice what’s going on out in the career side of things, and just get back to writing at home.”
Kahan added: “I now know that my North Star is just to do what makes me happy because it’s worked so well this time. And if it doesn’t work the next time, it’s ok, because I have to do this for my own sanity.”
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