‘Like Billie Eilish in 2019’: How Noah Kahan’s Alt-Folk Success Is Changing 2024 Pop

Jason Lipshutz
·7 min read
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It’s another good week to be Noah Kahan: on this week’s Hot 100, the alt-folk singer-songwriter’s long-rising breakthrough “Stick Season” becomes his first career top 10 hit, rising to No. 10 in its 20th week on the chart. Kahan’s now-signature hit is the title track of his third studio album, Stick Season — which rebounds to its previous peak of No. 3 on the Billboard 200 this week thanks to a new deluxe edition dubbed Stick Season (Forever), 16 months after the album’s October 2022 release. Meanwhile, Kahan launches two new songs from the deluxe edition, “Forever” and “You’re Gonna Go Far,” onto the Hot 100 at Nos. 28 and 86, respectively.

Kahan’s dual chart triumph is a story of singular success: after grinding out multiple albums and hundreds of tour dates, the Strafford, Vt. native began an ascent towards crossover stardom in earnest last year as Stick Season’s listenership continued to swell. He is now, without a doubt, an A-list artist in popular music – yet the first few weeks of the new year have also suggested that, if 2023 was Kahan’s breakout year, 2024 may be the moment the greater sound of modern pop bends around him.

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As “Stick Season” hits the top 10, a slew of folk-adjacent, guitar-led, vaguely rustic sing-alongs have concurrently infiltrated the Hot 100 — from Benson Boone’s “Beautiful Things” to Teddy Swims’ “Lose Control” to Michael Marcagi’s “Scared to Start” to Good Neighbours’ “Home” — making clear that Kahan’s influence is extending beyond his own wins. “This lane is now open,” Kwame Dankwa, program director of WXXX (95.5 FM) in South Burlington, Vt., tells Billboard of the burgeoning folk-pop boom.

A little over a decade ago, folk music experienced a pop revival thanks to what has been summarized as the “stomp clap hey” movement, with bands like Mumford & Sons, the Lumineers and Of Monsters & Men scoring banjo-heavy crossover hits and playing to sprawling festival crowds. While some of Kahan’s tunes modernize the stomp-clap sound, the core tenets of his heart-on-sleeve aesthetic — detailed storytelling, vulnerable vocals, scruffy guitar strums that could lead a song anywhere from folk to rock to country to pop — are being refracted through a variety of different styles and voices.

“There’s a confluence of influences — not just in the folk and singer-songwriter space, but also in indie, alt-country, soul,” says Cecilia Winter, Spotify’s Global Hits editorial lead. That’s why, even though a song like Teddy Swims’ soul-pop waltz “Lose Control” doesn’t resemble Kahan’s sound, the emotional songwriting and unfussy vocal take can be grouped together with “Stick Season” in a playlist or radio block. “We’re definitely seeing a heightened demand for these more raw, less-polished songs,” Winter adds.

Part of the explanation for this shift can be chalked up to timing: the advent of TikTok at the beginning of the decade, along with the global pandemic, produced a new wave of young artists stuck at home and sharing clips of themselves performing stripped-down songs from their bedrooms. Kahan experienced that circumstantial effect on his music firsthand: after his 2019 debut Busyhead failed to earn a sizable audience, the singer-songwriter kept writing throughout the pandemic (and about it, too — see the COVID name-check in the “Stick Season” lyrics) and posting song clips on TikTok. Weeks of teasers for “Dial Drunk” last year, for instance, stoked enough excitement that the song earned Kahan his first Hot 100 debut, and kicked off his crossover bid in earnest.

Also a key factor in the return of folk-pop: a superstar releasing back-to-back projects in that mode. Taylor Swift’s pair of 2020 albums, Folklore and Evermore, not only produced more eye-popping commercial returns and critical acclaim, but undoubtedly influenced a new generation of listeners a decade after folk’s last pop crossover.

“The biggest artist in the world [was] writing very grounded folk music that tells stories,” Kahan told Billboard last month, in reference to Swift’s sonic pivot. “And it allowed a huge new audience to find interest in that and to tap into that world.” The rise of alt-country troubadour Zach Bryan over the past two years was another major precedent for Kahan’s success; another rootsier storyteller whose songs were scooped up by the TikTok set, Bryan has become a stadium headliner, while also championing and collaborating with Kahan.

Perhaps the biggest recent change to this movement is happening at pop radio: while Swift’s Folklore/Evermore offerings and Bryan’s early hits never translated from streaming platforms to the top 40 airwaves, songs like “Stick Season,” “Lose Control” and “Beautiful Things” all reside in the top 25 of the current Pop Airplay chart. Dankwa says that, while WXXX has been keeping “Stick Season” and “Dial Drunk” from Vermont’s hometown hero in heavy rotation, he’s noticed that demand of similar-sounding artists on pop airplay is rising.

“With Noah Kahan’s success, so many [listeners] got their tastebuds wet, and they got hooked,” he notes. “They are saying, ‘We want more of this.’”

Along with factors like TikTok, the pandemic lockdowns and radio adoption, Winter suspects that the success of an artist like Kahan also speaks to a greater cultural push against technological superficiality. That includes combating the use of AI in music, of course, but also practices like image-smoothing via Photoshop and carefully curated social media feeds, in order to be more direct and genuine.

“There’s something distinctly human about folk,” says Winter. “With an ongoing shift towards greater authenticity, I think that shift bleeds into pop music, which is really a sponge for whatever is happening in culture.”

And Kahan — a gifted songwriter whose introspective folk songs contain a pop sensibility, so that his top 40-ready anthems still contain a sense of time and place — has served as the perfect emblem of that place. When Stick Season started taking off in 2023, Kahan had already been playing small and midsize venues around the U.S. for over a half-decade, developing a grassroots following that supported his small-town sing-alongs as pop fans began to take notice of his singles.

“Once an artist gets to a third album, sometimes they start to drift away from where normal people are, but I don’t see that happening with Noah,” says Dankwa. Kahan has naturally been heralded by Vermont and the greater New England area as he plotted arena headlining dates and earned a best new artist Grammy nod, but Dankwa believes Kahan is still “willing to tell everybody’s story. … People in Vermont know and understand him, but you could apply his songs to rural life anywhere in America.”

As a result, new hits that range from Boone’s full-throated folk-rocker “Beautiful Things” (which spends a second week in the top 5 of the Hot 100) to Marcagi’s wistful strum-along “Scared to Start” (which debuted at No. 98 on last week’s chart) are further placing Kahan’s fingerprints across the pop charts as Kahan himself collects more hits. Juniper, Spotify’s new flagship folk playlist, has collected over 93,000 likes since launching last October — and Winter hopes that, as the sound’s place in pop music snowballs in 2024, more women and artists of color can gain traction in a space that’s been thus far dominated by white men, citing artists like Kara Jackson and Tiny Habits as just as worthy of mainstream moments.

Regardless of where this new boom leads, however, Winter views Kahan as the de facto leader of this movement, and predicts his influence to continue growing. “Noah reminds me of where Billie Eilish was in 2019,” she notes. “She’d been putting out music for a long time and building this core fan base, and then crossed over into the hit space in such a major way that all of a sudden there were a hundred mini-Billie Eilishes. That’s kind of what is happening with Noah Kahan.”

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