You're listening to Song Exploder,
where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made.
I'm Rishikesh Hirway.
This episode contains explicit language.
Noah Kahn is a singer and songwriter from Stratford, Vermont.
Last year, in 2022, he released Stick Season, his third record.
The title track from that record went viral on TikTok when Noah was first writing it and posting pieces of it.
One of those videos has over 10 million plays.
And as of this recording, on Spotify, the full song has almost 100 million streams.
For this episode, Noah talked to me about the process of making that song,
what led him to post half a song on TikTok, and what happened after that.
You'll hear the raw recordings off his phone, the different drafts he made as he worked.
You'll hear the versions he first shared on social media.
And you'll hear his bracingly honest appraisal of the winding path he took in his life and in his music to get to where he is now.
My name is Noah Kahn.
I graduated high school and I got a record deal when I was a senior and I had to kind of decide between going to Tulane in New Orleans or taking this record deal.
And, you know, it was a pretty easy choice.
I was never a great student, never really applied myself and kind of just fucked around in school.
And I didn't think college was going to be something that was beneficial for me.
My parents were kind of like, hey, this is so expensive.