Noah Kahan had done the thing. He went from playing bars and clubs in his native Vermont and the Northeast to blowing up with his third album, 2022’s Stick Season, which eventually climbed to No. 2 on the Billboard 200 album chart two years later, cementing his status as a arena — and now stadium— superstar.
But in a new cover story in Rolling Stone, the 29-year-old singer who famously plumbs the dark corners of depression, loneliness, heartache and bleak winters on his affecting, so-simple-they’re-complex folk pop songs, said all that attention almost made him walk away from it all.
“Every cliché about music has proven so true for me,” he told the mag. “Like, ‘You can get everything you want, and it’s still not going to do it!’”
When he wrapped his endless Stick Season tour in September 2024, Kahan said the notion of recording a follow-up was daunting. “Right after the tour, I was just sick of it,” said the singer. “This thing that’s supposed to be so fun and so rewarding is becoming tiring and making you anxious all the time.”
Kahan said he considered a career reboot, or rather a career blow-up to explore some other, possibly less stressful profession. He thought about enrolling in psychology classes at a community college, got fingerprinted so he could be a substitute teacher and even entertained the idea of pivoting to golf course groundskeeper work, repairing the divots in the grass instead of the ones in his heart. “I thought that would be such a therapeutic thing,” he said.
And while the magazine described Kahan’s songs as having “deceptively simple melodies with intricate lyrics that are simultaneously ultra-specific and highly relatable,” The National co-founder and producer Aaron Dessner — who worked with Kahan on the new album — said he’s all-in on Team Noah and hopes he never stops writing. “It’s refreshing to me that someone like Noah has become a superstar because he’s the anti-idol,” Dessner said. “He’s not seeking it. He’s far more gifted than anyone might really know unless you’ve been up close to hear him sing. He’s one of the most brilliant songwriters we have today.”
When they convened at Dessner’s woodsy, cozy Long Pond studio in upstate New York in late 2024, Kahan loved the laid-back energy, and told his host that he was psyched to hang, but wasn’t sure he had any songs left in him, or anything to say. “‘I’ve just been so burnt out and kind of lost,’” he told Dessner. But then, within an hour, Kahan wrote one of the album’s most affecting songs, “Porch Light,” and, he said, “it felt instantaneous in that way — this river of ideas.”
Those old feelings of stuck-ness were back just a few months later, though, when Kahan moved out to Joshua Tree, Calif. in March 2025 into an all-glass Airbnb that felt “lonely as hell.” He calls it his “infamous Joshua Tree OCD meltdown” period, where he failed to find the fantasy rom-com life in a cozy small town he’d been looking for.
Overwhelmed by a “pretty severe episode” of intrusive thoughts Kahan said he struggled to write songs as he convinced himself that he’d said, or done, things he hadn’t. Afraid to share the thoughts with anyone fearing he might alarm his team, Kahan did a virtual session with his therapist, who diagnosed him with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), which, in retrospect, made sense when he reviewed the tape from his childhood and his earlier life and discovered that he’d had a set of rituals and “strains” that had long plagued him.
“It was this real insidious disorder that I was struggling with,” he said. As cool as the century-old Joshua Trees were, Kahan was reminded of an inescapable truth: “You cannot leave behind what’s going on in your head no matter how far way you travel, or how beautiful your surroundings are.”
Now in what his manager Drew Simmons said is the “healthiest place” he’s ever seen his client, Kahan has plenty to celebrate. He recently scored his first No. 1 album on the Billboard 200 with the new album. In addition, his opening 389,000 equivalent album units earned in the U.S. for the week ending April 30, according to Luminate, was the largest week for a rock album by units since the chart began measuring by units in late 2014. It was also the third-biggest week of 2026 among all albums and the singer’s biggest week by units in his career.
The cherry on top of those numbers is that Kahan Kahan’s first week 215.4 million on-demand official streams for his songs, is the largest streaming week of any album in 2026, which helped him jump from No. 24 to No. 1 on the Billboard Artist 100 chart, marking his first lead on that chart to date. He charted a total of 21 songs from The Great Divide — comprised of the 17 tracks on the standard edition and the four extras on the deluxe version — including 12 in top 40.
“You find out who you are in the moments when you’re alone,” he told RS of finding his way back to contentedness and being proud of his new album. “In the moments things are quiet, and you don’t have 30,000 people screaming that they love you. I needed to be brought back down to earth, and I think the process, as hard as it was, really did bring me back.”
If you or someone you know needs mental health help, text “STRENGTH” to the Crisis Text Line at 741-741 to be connected to a certified crisis counselor.
