Noah Kahan

Noah Kahan (born January 22, 2000) is a singer-songwriter from Strafford, Vermont, raised on a tree farm at the edge of a small New England community that would become the emotional bedrock of nearly everything he would go on to write.^[1] His father, Josh Kahan, is Jewish and taught him guitar as a child; his mother, Lauri Berkenkamp, is a published author of parenting guides and instilled in him a discipline for writing that would prove equally formative.^[1] He began composing songs at age 8 and was uploading them to SoundCloud by his early teens.

Kahan attended Hanover High School in Hanover, New Hampshire, before signing with Republic Records in 2017 and deferring his admission to Tulane University to pursue music full time.^[1] His debut album Busyhead (2019) introduced his signature blend of confessional folk songwriting and New England imagery. The follow-up I Was / I Am arrived in 2021, but it was Stick Season (2022) that broke him into mainstream consciousness, its intimately detailed portrait of Vermont anxiety and longing becoming a multi-platform phenomenon and earning him a Grammy nomination for Best New Artist.

Throughout his career Kahan has spoken openly about his struggles with anxiety, depression, body dysmorphia, and disordered eating, a candor that has made him a significant voice in destigmatizing mental illness for a generation of younger listeners.^[2] He founded The Busyhead Project, a nonprofit dedicated to making therapy more accessible. In 2026, the Netflix documentary Noah Kahan: Out of Body (directed by Nick Sweeney, premiered at SXSW March 2026) chronicled his journey from playing small pre-pandemic venues to headlining Fenway Park, including frank examinations of his mental health battles.^[2]

The catastrophic Vermont flooding of July 2023 became a formative moment in his creative development. While on tour during the disaster, Kahan raised roughly $190,000 for flood relief by livestreaming a sold-out Red Rocks Amphitheatre concert.^[3] The experience of watching his home state suffer from a distance planted seeds of guilt and longing that would directly shape his fourth album.

His fourth studio album The Great Divide (April 2026), co-produced with Aaron Dessner (The National, Taylor Swift), marked an artistic evolution from raw personal grief toward empathy and reconciliation, examining the emotional costs his confessional art placed on those closest to him.^[4][5] On August 23, 2025, Kahan married Brenna Nolan, his partner since high school, in a private ceremony at the historic Strafford Town House in Vermont.^[6] Their long history together, which predates his rise to fame by years, forms the autobiographical foundation of album track "We Go Way Back," a love song about the enduring value of someone who has known you through every version of yourself.