Noah Kahan Will “Never Really Get Tired" of Music About New England

Noah Kahan Reveals He Goes Full “Hannah Montana Mode” to Stay Grounded

Noah Kahan never has to worry about feeling homesick.

Should a yearning for his New England roots arise, all he has to do is turn to his own setlist.

“What's nice about the music is that it's so deeply connected to where I'm from that I do feel on stage like I'm back in New Hampshire or back in Vermont,” Kahan admitted in an exclusive interview with E! News. “At each show, there's always a bunch of people either living in the city that are from New England or have traveled from New England.”

And they’re sure to let him know. “I always like to see the signs of people that are like I'm from Vermont, I'm from Maine or Boston or Mass or Connecticut or Rhode Island,” he continued. “Getting to see people that are traveling all this way to make this feel like home for all of us is really nice.”

As such, he’s “all for” the many conversations on tour that inevitably deviate into a fan’s own connection to the region.

So, it’s no surprise that Kahan’s music ends up being so intrinsically tied to his upbringing in New England, songs like “Stick Season” highlighting the regional term for the bitter end of fall and “Mess” detailing the interstate route he’d take to get from Vermont to Boston. (Not to mention, his beloved ode to Maine in the song of the same name from his Cape Elizabeth EP—the title itself a coastal town in the Pine Tree State.)

“I'm really proud to be able to write about where I'm from,” Kahan emphasized. “I'm really proud to be able to try to explain it and describe it in the way that it's always meant to me in my heart. I think we feel such connections to these places we're from. Someone asks you why you love it, and I have a really hard time saying why, but it's just home.”

“So, my biggest challenge and my biggest goal is to always try to do my best to really illustrate what home means through song,” he explained. “I know my experience is not that of every Vermonter or New Hampshire or New Englander, but being able to experience my Vermont through the songwriting and show people what my Vermont looks like is really special—it's something that makes me feel connected.”

And he knows he’s not alone in feeling this way, highlighting fellow New England-born singer-songwriters like Anaïs Mitchell, Ray LaMontagne, James Taylor, Grace Potter and Phish.

“Making it in New England is hard,” the Busyhead Project founder noted. “There's not a lot of access to live music, depending on where you're from. You can be from a really small town, and knowing people that have made it kind of out of the scene and have represented New England so well is really cool. I try to keep in touch with those folks as much as I can.”

Although his musical journey has earned him Grammy nominations and taken him on global arena tours, he’s as connected to his roots as ever (just drink in his partnership with New England-born Culture Pop Soda). And that’ll remain an important part of his musical path forward.

“I'm in my 11th, 12th year almost of being a professional recording artist, and I've never really felt like I had a purpose in the way that I do when it comes to writing about where I'm from,” he explained. “The well is so deep in New England. There's so much lore and history and emotion—not just in my own life, but in the states themselves. That it's just really exciting to kind of keep drawing on that, and I'll never really get tired of writing about New England.”