Noah Kahan was crowned a superstar. It messed with his head

Noah Kahan was crowned a superstar. It messed with his head58 minutes agoShareSaveAdd as preferred on GoogleMark SavageMusic correspondentGetty ImagesWith heartfelt songs and relatable lyrics, Noah Kahan has been called "Gen Z's older brother" and "Folk Malone"A couple of hours before we meet Noah Kahan in a vacant suite of his fancy West End hotel, he posts a video of a new song, called Porchlight.Nothing unusual in that, you might think. But the video features the 29-year-old Vermonter singing from the lavatory of his hotel bathroom; with a hashtag reading "explosive diarrhoea".So it's with a little trepidation that we greet him a couple of hours later. Is there a safe exit route if he's caught short? Should we ensure a plentiful supply of bananas?Luckily, it turns out Kahan was just teasing his fans."The bathroom has really good acoustics," he laughs, "and I always think it's funny to be sitting on the toilet playing music. My fans seem to like it when I talk about poop and stuff, so it's a good way to mix music and bathroom humour."Good grief.But if there's a better first introduction to Kahan, I can't imagine one.He's an unlikely music sensation, whose rootsy songs of restlessness and belonging captured TikTok's Gen Z romantics. Exploring themes like heartache, alienation and the uncertainty of early adulthood, his lyrics are both funny and profound. "Time moves so damn slow I swear I feel my organs failing," he sings on 2022's Homesick, perfectly capturing the tedium of small-town America."He brings us closer to our humanity in the same way some of the great '60s folk songwriters did," enthused Marcus Mumford in an essay for Time magazine.In 2022, Olivia Rodrigo covered the title track to his third album, Stick Season, in Radio 1's Live Lounge, putting a rocket under his career. Within a year, he was headlining arenas. Last summer,...