Gabe Simon Talks Working With the “Prolific” Noah Kahan, Reveals His Secret to Successful Songwriting (Exclusive)

Gabe Simon is giving fans a peek behind the curtain. The songwriter and producer, who’s worked with the likes of Noah Kahan, James Bay, and Lana Del Rey, is the latest guest on American Songwriter’s Off the Record podcast.

During his chat with host Lisa Konicki, Simon shared how he’s able to pull great work out of some of the biggest names in the music industry.

“I am a really chatty person. I love to talk, but I also love to ask questions. I’m a very curious person. I want to sit down on the floor and get my little book out,” he said. “Whether it’s to Noah or to Dermot [Kennedy] or to Koe [Wetzel] or to Lana, I’m just going to ask questions. I want to figure out what they want to talk about.”

“I think one of the greatest gifts that we can give people is our undivided attention,” Simon added. “… If you look at somebody and you really care, especially if they get so used to being looked through or looked at, you want to get to their level and just kind of figure out what’s going on.”

No matter who he’s working with, Simon said he starts with a theme and then sets out to learn an artist’s writing style.

“I’m writing around basic sentences, like, how they would even structure words together, just so I can know what they sound like,” he explained. “I write tons and tons and pages and pages and pages, and afterward, I read them all back to them. They’ll be like, ‘Whoa, I said that,’ or ‘I’ll do this.’ And then I try to imagine what those words sound like. I start playing chords or putting pieces together here.”

Gabe Simon on Working With Noah Kahan

That method has proved successful. After meeting Kahan, for instance, Simon, who’d never worked on a folk record before, signed on to produce Stick Season, the singer’s breakout LP. The pair started their work with the title track.

“We kept overproducing it, then we would dial it back because we… didn’t know what to do,” Simon recalled. “Honestly, I was insecure because I’d never made a folk record before.”

Ultimately, thanks to the “Mark Twain-ian idealism” in Kahan’s writing, Simon decided to simply “do the bare minimum to support his storytelling.”

“I’d go 10 percent more here and 10 percent more there. I didn’t want to get in the way at all,” he explained. “I wanted people to fall in love with Noah, just fall in love with his words. And then once we did that, we could do anything.”

Later, the men teamed up to pen “Northern Attitude” in just 40 minutes.

“Noah is probably the most prolific songwriter I know on the face of the planet,” Simon said. “… Noah was playing this [melody]. I ran down the hall, and I go, ‘What the hell is that?’ And he just goes, ‘I don’t know, man. I just took some edibles. This is crazy.’ And I was just like, ‘OK, cool. Keep doing that.’”

The process continued on that “easy and fun” track as the men messed around with the song. Less than an hour later, the track was finished.

“He did three passes of the song, made up on the spot, right there. We put them together and made the song,” Simon said. “He just made up three minutes of a song three times. Off the top of his head.”

“It was the first time I’d ever seen Noah do something like that,” he continued. “I know he’s capable of writing great songs. I’d seen him do it at other different times, but it was the first time I ever saw this guy, who has one of the best memories in the face of the planet, who can think of all these bits and remember everything that’s going to happen, put together words, put together melody, put together a structure.”

The experience left Simon “in awe” of Kahan and his talents. It’s for that reason that he decided to work with Kahan again on his next album, The Great Divide.

Work began on the LP when Kahan was coming off of tour, exhausted and unsure what was next. The title track was the first taste of what the album would eventually become.

“He came over, and the biggest thing is we had that riff… We knew we had something magical when we started playing those two parts together,” Simon said. “… It kind of felt like a Midwest punk song. And we were like, “This is a weird direction for us to take.”

Gabe Simon Reveals His Favorite Part of His Career

Kahan isn’t the only artist who Simon has worked with. He’s inspired Wetzel to be “an open book” on songs like “High Road,” tapped into Suki Waterhouse’s “fun” and “silly side” on “Tiny Raisin,” and even moved to London to work with Bay.

Through it all, Simon has had his family by his side.

“One of the things that I love about what my career has been able to do is to be able to have my family and to have my music career, and to not feel like I have to choose,” Simon said. “It’s a really unique place to be. Artists, they leave, they tour, they have to be away from their families.”

“I’ve had this wonderful privilege of bringing my family with me everywhere I’ve gone, whether it’s to Ireland to make a Dermot Kennedy record, or to London to make a James Bay record, or anywhere that we need to go,” he added. “What I probably love most about what I get to do is that I get to have them and I never have to leave them in that way.”