![]() ![]() I would count down until it got to a thousand and be so excited, and we would call each other and be excited. I remember like one day it was, like, a thousand plays, and for me it was so cool. We just produced a song I made called “ Sink,” that he didn't really put a crazy EDM thing to - we kind of just made it like a nice, acoustic, Ed Sheeran-style song. He had toured a little bit with his older brother, and I was really excited to get to work with him. He had a couple songs and had, like, hundreds of thousands of streams. We did a song with another producer, a guy from Norwich, Vermont, who was kind of a legend. Riley Robinson: When you say you were found, how were you found? Was this on YouTube, or. That's kind of how the music career started. So they were like, “Take the record deal.” And I ended up doing that. You're definitely going to, like, join a fraternity, and just drink your way through college.” They basically didn't want to spend $63,000 a year for me to drop out and be a musician anyway. I had to decide between Tulane and taking the record deal. My senior year, I got offered a record deal, and I decided to not go to college. The music was found by a record label and a manager. And that's kind of where the professional career started. So we would make that kind of music, and it was really cool, and it started to get some traction online. This is like when Avicii was huge, and this kind of folk-EDM stuff was happening. He did all this kind of like electronic stuff. I started working with a producer that was a senior when I was a sophomore, and he was really cool. He can make music and he's got something else to him.” That really helped give me some confidence in my music. It was nice - when I started to play music, I started to play the school talent shows, and joined a capella - that I started to kind of like, “Oh, this is not just an asshole. I think I was always trying to just be somebody I wasn't, trying to be funny, and I could be kind of a dick. ![]() I kept writing and started introducing my musical self into my school life, which I think was cool, because I think it provided me with a little bit of security in myself. I would play my own original songs with a bunch of people that weren't listening, just trying to eat baked potatoes and shit. It was what I’d look forward to all the time. I'll do open mics at a restaurant called Jesse's every Thursday. I wrote songs every day for years, and then I started, when I was like 12 or 13, doing open mics in town in Hanover. And that's kind of when I felt like the most me, I guess. Didn't really feel like I was representing myself very well in school. ![]() ![]() In school, I was always kind of like a class clown, an idiot. But when I look back, I'm really grateful for that advice, because it helped me get better at writing. She was never mean, or too harsh, but she would be like, “Yeah, this is why you need to fix this,” or, “I don't like that one for this reason,” or, “I like this for this reason.” I think at the time, I wanted to be told everything was really good. Noah Kahan: I would play the songs for my mom, and she would give me pretty good criticism on them. Can you tell what you were like as a kid, in Strafford, and how you got started writing music? Riley Robinson: I’m gonna start at the beginning. He joined VTDigger on Zoom earlier this month.īelow is a partial transcript, edited for length and clarity. He’ll return to Vermont this summer, for two sold-out shows on the Burlington waterfront. Kahan is going back on tour later this month. There’s a “weirdness of existing in a place that you've just written about,” he said. He’s had to reconcile his romanticized version of Vermont with the reality: He’s just home, and it's cold, and he has to go outside and clean up after the dog. Turns out returning to a place you’ve described so candidly can feel a bit strange. With lyrics that describe “dirt roads named after high school friends’ grandfathers,” the record is, in Kahan’s words, “a love letter to New England.” He performed on Jimmy Kimmel Live and the Kelly Clarkson Show and sold out venues coast to coast.Īnd then, after the first leg of his tour, he returned home to the Upper Valley and the isolated, between-villages places he crystallized on his third full-length album, Stick Season. The album that followed, recorded in Guilford, debuted at #14 on the Billboard 200 Chart and has been Kahan’s most successful to date. Kahan’s metaphorical use of “stick season,” the time between Vermont foliage and proper snow, went viral on TikTok last year and sparked covers by Zach Bryan, Chelsea Cutler, Maisie Peters and countless fans who recorded themselves strumming in their bedrooms. Now, his songs have been streamed more than one billion times. Noah Kahan remembers getting excited when a song he put on SoundCloud hit a thousand plays. ![]()
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