“It Felt Like Someone Had Taken My Power Away”: Noah Kahan Reflects on the Pressure of Following Up ‘Stick Season’ with a New Album

Noah Kahan has always been refreshingly - and often heartbreakingly - honest with his fans, both through the Vermont native's catalogue of visceral anthems and his social media.

He's previously touched on the weight of expectation he felt coming off the back of an historic run with Stick Season in 2022, and feeling the immense pressure to follow this up with another top-tier album. Four years later, Kahan is ready to put out his next body of work into the world, with The Great Divide arriving on April 24th.

In a new interview with Chef Josh for his Mythical Kitchen video series, Kahan gets more candid than ever about the difficulties he faced when trying to write following Stick Season.

When Josh questions how he felt about the prospect of “What's next?” after the success of Stick Season, Kahan muses, “I was asking myself that question the second I finished Stick Season. It's the worst question in the world. It's the worst. I mean, as a creative person, getting asked, ‘What are you gonna do next?’ just creates a pit in your stomach, where you're like, ‘Oh s***, like, I gotta follow this up”.

Kahan stresses that this is something he's struggled with from a young age, “When I was 16 years old, no record deal, nothing, I would write a song, and I would cry, like, ‘I'm never gonna write another song as good as that again!’ It's just something that's chased me my whole life, and I think [it got harder with]...the pressure of having all the sold-out shows and the song on the radio and people being like, ‘This album changed my life’, and these amazing opportunities I had”.

Kahan admits these fan interactions quickly turned sour, “I started to see them all as negatives, because I was like, it just means that when I disappoint you with my next thing, it's gonna be that much harder for me to bear. So I started to hate when people told me they loved [the album], because it made me feel like that's just another person whose face is gonna fall when they hear how bad my next thing is”.

The ‘Northern Attitude’ singer-songwriter reflects on how, initially at least, he used distraction and procrastination as a coping mechanism, “I was like, ‘Here's another thing I can do’, ‘Here's another event I can go to’ or a place I can go or a show I can do, so that I never have to confront this scary thing. And actually confronting it was really, really challenging for me”, adding, “I always try to be careful about complaining about being having to be creative and having to be a musician”.

Nonetheless, Kahan movingly highlights, “It was the worst professional thing I've gone through, having to look at that blank piece of paper after four years and be like, ‘I gotta start’”.

He offers fans a snapshot into how lost he felt at first in the writing process, “And I was struggling to even rhyme the word ‘me’ with ‘pee’ and ‘you’ with ‘poo’. I couldn't make anything happen. And it felt like someone had taken my power away”.

Kahan concludes, “It was really difficult and really challenging for me to just start. I'm lucky to have had my wife and my mom and all these people in my life that have been with me through these cycles I've gone on, and helped me get through that s***”.

Thankfully, with the help of his friends and family, Kahan managed to reignite his creative spark, with the fruits of his labour being the eagerly awaited new album, The Great Divide.

Judging by the title-track and the songs Kahan has been teasing via socials, he never had any reason to doubt his abilities to follow up Stick Season with another game-changing album. But even so, it's powerful hearing Kahan once again opening up about his personal struggles, and in doing so, inspiring fans to do the same.

One thing is certain, although we've all been desperate for new music from the folk titan, Kahan's fanbase would never want him to feel harried by listeners’ demands. With Kahan, the wait is always worth it, and we're counting down the days to April 24th.

Watch the full Mythical Kitchen interview with Noah Kahan below:

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