When Noah Kahan wrote the song Growing Sideways off his hit album Stick Season, he had just gotten off Zoloft for the first time. The antidepressant helped improve his mental health, but it also dulled his creativity, he found.
“That’s my fundamental struggle with antidepressants,” Kahan tells Q‘s Tom Power in an interview. “A lot of times I feel like the battle is trying to be creative versus being happy. Would I rather be happy and a little numb or really depressed and creative, but not happy at all?”
Kahan, 27, signed a record deal a decade ago as a high school senior, but only rose to mainstream fame after he released Stick Season in late 2022. Now, he’s considered music’s next big thing.
WATCH | Noah Kahan’s interview with Tom Power:
Exploring themes like love, loneliness, substance abuse and mental health, his lyrics are often both funny and profound. Growing Sideways tackles his experience in therapy, giving insight into his unhealthy coping mechanisms, traumas and healing. “So I forgot my medication, fell into a manic high,” he sings. “Spent my savings at a Lulu, now I’m suffering in style.”
While Kahan’s fans deeply relate to the song, he worried that, in a way, he was lying to them and himself — just like how he had lied to his therapist for years. He was only eight or nine years old when his parents first sent him for counselling, which he didn’t really understand as a kid.
A fundamental fear of mine was that I had just drifted through life without any idea of who I actually was.– Noah Kahan
“Something in me couldn’t be honest with the [therapist] for a long time,” Kahan says. “You can kind of just cheat your way through it, if you just say smart-sounding things or understand the idea of your emotions enough to talk about them in a way that feels articulate.
“It’s inherently manipulative for yourself and for that person. But I was just clock-watching every time, like, ‘How do I get out of here and seem like I’m making progress?’ … The truth is, I was going to therapy, but I wasn’t in therapy. I was just putting on a performance and I did that for a long time. So I was writing about that feeling of, like, maybe I don’t have any idea who I am because I’ve just been dancing around it for so many years.”
Kahan was afraid that he had gotten so good at parroting therapy jargon that Growing Sideways could actually be sending out a “false message” to his fans.
“When I was writing Growing Sideways, a fundamental fear of mine was that I had just drifted through life without any idea of who I actually was or what I was actually feeling — and that scared me,” he says.
The second verse of the song about stopping his medication and spending a lot of money at Lululemon, was based on a real experience he had when he suffered withdrawal symptoms after going off the antidepressant Prozac cold turkey.
WATCH | Noah Kahan performing Growing Sideways:
“I walked the streets of Los Angeles and got this horrible haircut that I thought looked really cool,” Kahan tells Power. “I don’t know if it was Lulu, but I spent a bunch of money on terrible clothing and I was just walking around like a crazy person because I was literally having crazy withdrawals. And so I figured I’d throw that into the song because I thought it was a funny memory — and I wanted to shout out Lululemon.”
Now, Kahan is doing much better than when he wrote his latest album. But for him, it’s not just about writing songs that destigmatize mental illness; it’s about putting his money where his mouth is. His charity the Busyhead Project helps connect people with mental health resources and he regularly speaks about mental health at his shows.
“I’m playing arenas now,” Kahan says. “That comes with money and opportunities that I didn’t have before and it would be a waste to not use that platform for something really good … like raising money for organizations.”
The full interview with Noah Kahan is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Interview with Noah Kahan produced by Vanessa Nigro.