The first No. 1 song of 2024 is Noah Kahan‘s “Stick Season,” which hit the top of the UK’s Official Singles Chart with 6.5 million streams since the start of the new year. It also marks the first chart-topper overall for the singer/songwriter from Vermont.
Videos by American Songwriter
The single, which Kahan has previously explained describes the sense of melancholy that comes between fall and the first snow in Vermont, had previously spent two weeks at No. 2 on the chart non-consecutively. Kahan is set to embark on a North American tour this year, but has said that he’s not rushing to make new music following the success of his 2022 album, also titled Stick Season.
[RELATED: What Does “Stick Season” Actually Mean? Noah Kahan Explains the New Englandism]
In conversation with American Songwriter at the 2023 Americana Music Awards & Honors, Kahan shared that the runaway success of “Stick Season” has altered how he approaches songwriting.
“I’m always writing and always making music,” Kahan said. “I think [touring] makes it hard to have an unadulterated process. And for me, a huge part of songwriting is sitting and having time to access what I’m feeling in a real way on the road.”
Giving Album “Its Complete Run”
“It’s hard to find that balance. You’re always going from high to low, and I think I need something in the middle to figure out how I’m really feeling,” he continued. “So it’s definitely disrupted my creative process, but I knew that going in, and I wanted Stick Season to be a record that carried me through a few years.”
It seems Kahan is hoping to take a breather from recording during his tour, and will be back making new music when the tour concludes. He also shared wanting to take some time to acknowledge fans’ reactions to Stick Season instead of churning out new music immediately.
“I think it’s so easy to get caught up in releasing a record every year and working on new music,” he said. “But Stick Season is so special and important to me that I wanted to give it its complete run and make sure that we played every place possible and people got to hear it in its entirety, everywhere we went.”
Photo by Arturo Holmes/Getty Images
