Noah Kahan will release his new album, The Great Divide, in April, but he says that creating it — or, at least, starting to create it — was “the worst professional thing I’ve gone through.”
While Noah is aware that he shouldn’t complain about being creative or being a musician, he admitted during an appearance on Mythical Kitchen’s Last Meal that the pressure to follow up Stick Season left him in despair.
“I mean, as a creative person, getting asked, ‘What are you gonna do next?’ just creates a pit in your stomach, where you’re like, ‘Oh s***, like, I gotta follow this up,’” he tells host Josh Scherer.
“The pressure of having all the sold-out shows and the song on the radio and people being like, ‘This album changed my life.’ … I started to see them all as negatives,” he explains. “Because I was like, ‘It just means that when I disappoint you with my next thing, it’s gonna be that much harder for me to bear.'”
“So I started to hate when people told me they loved [the album], because it made me feel like, ‘That’s just another person whose face is gonna fall when they hear how bad my next thing is.'”
“It was the worst professional thing I’ve gone through, having to look at that blank piece of paper after four years and be like, ‘I gotta start,’” he shares. And when he finally did, he says, it was a struggle.
“It felt like someone had taken my power away,” he says. But eventually he was able to write The Great Divide, thanks to his wife, his mom and “all these people in my life that have been with me through these cycles I’ve gone on and helped me get through that s***.”
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