During a new interview, Stella Lefty clears up why Noah Kahan has a writing credit on her hit single, ‘Boston’, despite Kahan not being directly involved in the creative process.

While chatting to Vanity Fair, Lefty recalls how she wrote a portion of the infectious track, which was inspired by a date with her now-boyfriend, Vincent Mason. Lefty then posted a clip of the track across socials before she'd even finished it.

The Illinois native reflects, “I wrote the chorus to ‘Boston,’ posted it, and didn’t think about it at all. I woke up the next morning and [the video] had done relatively well”.

A number of fans started commenting about an apparent similarity between the song and Kahan's now-iconic single, ‘Stick Season’. But as Lefty stresses to Vanity Fair, she didn't base ‘Boston’ on Kahan's folk anthem, “When I was writing the song, I wasn’t thinking about Noah Kahan. I was literally thinking about nothing at all”.

The ‘Summer You Were Mine’ singer-songwriter goes on to reveal that, after fans highlighted the supposed likeness, Kahan's representatives reached out to Lefty's team about ‘Boston’.

Lefty outlines that they said, “We think this sounds similar,” with the fast-emerging artist and her crew deciding to give Kahan a writing credit before ‘Boston’ came out, in order to stop any potential risk of legal action. Lefty explains, “I don’t want to step on anybody’s toes, so I’m like, if this sounds like that, whatever, all good”.

‘Boston’, of course, went on to become one of the biggest hits of 2026, with the uptempo offering currently sitting at almost 200 million streams on Spotify alone at the time of writing, less than six months after its release. It is on-track to reach a new high of No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 this week, and is a top candidate - alongside Ella Langley's ‘Choosin‘ Texas’ - for the official 2026 Song of the Summer title.

With Kahan having a reputation for always making a concerted effort to showcase and elevate up-and-coming artists, it sounds like this move to question whether ‘Boston’ borrowed elements from ‘Stick Season’ came from his team, rather than from the Vermont trailblazer himself. To this writer's ears, the similarities between these two songs are undoubtedly subtle, to say the least, but it's understandable for Lefty and her advisors to give a writing credit to Kahan, just to be safe.

We'd love to see Kahan joining Lefty for a reimagined version of ‘Boston’, to show there's no bad blood between them, a move that would surely give the folk-leaning earworm an extra boost as it vies to become Lefty's first ever No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100.