"I worry that I've just wasted so much time hating who I am." — Noah Kahan, On Purpose with Jay Shetty, April 2026

In March 2025, Noah Kahan drove out of an all-glass Airbnb in Joshua Tree, California, and convinced himself he had hit someone with his car. He hadn't. He turned the car around anyway and drove the road backward, scanning for a body.

He was twenty-eight. Stick Season — his third album, written in his mom's Vermont bedroom after two records that didn't break and broken on TikTok before anywhere else — had become the biggest folk-pop crossover of the decade. Madison Square Garden. Two sold-out nights at Fenway. Arenas across two continents. He had also just been diagnosed, for the first time in twenty years of therapy, with OCD.

The thing he was running from in Joshua Tree was the same thing that had built his career: a brain that would not stop telling him he was fundamentally not okay. Stick Season was a record about that brain. The album he was trying to write next was, supposedly, about getting better. He was terrified that if he ever stopped suffering, no one would care what he said.

This is folk-pop's reluctant survivor — the kid from a Vermont town of a thousand who became the genre's biggest star and tried to quit twice on the way up.

TL;DR: Why Noah Kahan is an Enneagram Type 4
  • Identity through feeling: Kahan's body dysmorphia and self-hatred are not symptoms he has — they're "tied up in who you are." Pure Type 4 wound.
  • The romantic outsider who stayed: An entire career written from "the perspective of someone who stayed behind" while everyone else left Vermont. That ache is the Four's signature longing.
  • Fear of healing: "I was so afraid of it dulling my creativity." Type 4 fuses suffering with identity. He was scared Lexapro would erase him.
  • Withdrawal as method: Wrote Stick Season alone in his mom's house during the pandemic. Wrote The Great Divide alone in a glass house in the desert. The 5 wing keeps him isolated to make the work.
  • Integration to 1: The Busyhead Project, the TIME essay, the meds, the documentary. When healthy, Fours move toward principled service — they turn the wound into something useful.

What is Noah Kahan's personality type?

Noah Kahan is an Enneagram Type 4

Noah Kahan is a Type 4 with a 5 wing — the Individualist with an Investigator's introversion. The Four is the romantic, the artist, the one who feels fundamentally different. The Four's core wound is shame: there's something defective at the center, and no amount of love or success can quite reach it.

The shame shows up in Kahan's own words about his body. "It's so tied up in who you are and the feelings you've had since you were a kid that it's hard to describe the body dysmorphia problem succinctly," he told Jay Shetty in April 2026. The pain isn't located. It's identity. That's the Four signature: the ache is who you are.

The 5 wing explains the rest of him. He withdraws to write. He read the DSM looking for himself. He intellectualizes his anxiety in long-form interviews. He goes to the desert alone. He writes folk music in his mother's bedroom because the room contains the feelings, and he is good at being alone with feelings.

Confidence on the typing: high. Almost every contradiction in his life — the small-town hermit who became a stadium act, the depression spokesperson who almost quit because he was afraid of getting better, the anxious kid who can't stop talking about anxiety — resolves cleanly when you read him as a Four.

Why Noah Kahan can't stop writing about Strafford, Vermont

He grew up in Strafford, Vermont. Population: roughly a thousand. His parents lived a few houses apart on the same road, even after their 2020 divorce.

Stick season, for the record, is the New England term for the few weeks between leaves-down and snow — November in its grayest, barest form, the worst fortnight of the year in the place he can't leave. He named the album after it.

The thing Kahan keeps trying to explain in interviews is that he didn't write Stick Season from the perspective of someone who left a small town. He wrote it from the perspective of someone who stayed.

"Friends would come home for Thanksgiving during stick season, then leave, and that loneliness would come back."

That sentence is the whole record. The album is not about leaving. It's about the silence after everyone else does. "You're Gonna Go Far" — later re-cut as a duet with Brandi Carlile — is the same beat made tender. He's at the bus stop telling someone he loves that they should leave. The narrator is always the one waving. Never the one waving back.

Kahan's longing is geographic. The friends are in New York. The career is in Nashville. The girls he dated are gone. He's still here, in the same town, on the same road, in the same bedroom where he learned guitar from his father at six years old. "I will die in the house that I grew up in," he sings on "Homesick." "I'm tired of dirt road named after high school friends' grandfathers." The line lands as a curse and a love letter at once — the Four can't hate Vermont without confessing he plans to be buried there.

The geography even has a song of its own. "The View Between Villages" is the drive between South Strafford and Strafford on a road protected by town ordinance. Kahan has said that when he drives it, he feels "truly and completely at peace." Then he passes his old house and the anxiety comes back. The narrator turns the car around at the end of the song. He never makes it home.

When Olivia Rodrigo brought him onstage at Madison Square Garden in April 2024 to share "Stick Season," she introduced him to her crowd: "I've been looking forward to this all tour. I found his music about a year ago and instantly became obsessed." Kahan wrote on Twitter afterward that he just wanted to thank her band for inviting him to sing — phrasing himself as a guest at his own song. Rodrigo treats him like a star. He treats himself like an interloper. When he tours, he flies back to Strafford anyway.

There's a moment in the Out of Body documentary that makes the whole pattern visible. Kahan describes a flooded farm in Vermont where horses had been turned out into the rain because the barn was unsafe. The horses stayed in the field. He noticed they didn't try to leave.

"I just felt jealous of these horses that had the ability to stay. I was flying to LA the next week."

A Four can be jealous of horses standing in a flood. That's not a metaphor he reached for. That's the metaphor that found him.

Noah Kahan's childhood: therapy at eight, the family fault line

Noah Kahan went to therapy for the first time at age eight. He was prescribed his first anxiety medication around thirteen. His OCD diagnosis came at twenty-eight. He was, by his own count, in some form of treatment for two decades before anyone gave him the right name for what was happening.

His mother, Lauri Berkenkamp, is a writer who published parenting guides for a living. His father, Josh Kahan, taught him to play guitar. The pairing is almost too on-the-nose: the kid raised by the woman who professionally explained how to raise kids, and the man who handed him the instrument he would later use to mythologize the family.

Josh is Jewish; Lauri isn't. Kahan grew up half-Jewish in a town of a thousand and has spent his adult life joking about it onstage — calling himself "the Jewish Capaldi," telling crowds "sometimes I just feel like Larry David walking around." Outsiderness was built in from the beginning.

When Kahan was in eighth grade, his father had a near-fatal biking accident. Traumatic brain injury. Coma. The dad who came back from the hospital was related to the dad who left for the bike ride, but not identical to him.

"How can I be mad when they could have died, or they could have stayed in that coma, or I could have never seen them again?"

The crisis was real. The grief was real. But the survivor's permission to be sad was conditional. Other people had it worse. Be grateful. The shame folds in on itself, becomes its own private architecture — the kind of guilt loop a Four with anxious attachment can sit inside for two decades.

Five years later, his parents divorced during the pandemic, while he was home in Vermont writing Stick Season. He turned the divorce into bits onstage. His mother sent him a careful text afterward that let him know her feelings had been hurt without saying so directly. He kept the bit in. Then he made the documentary so they could finally talk about it on camera.

Kahan's brother Richard is in the documentary too, putting the cost of the career into one sentence:

"I don't see [Noah] a lot. It does make it really special when we do get to hang out, especially when he's not on tour, and we can just kinda go back to regular older brother, younger brother, not Noah Kahan the superstar."

Richard wants Noah back. Noah wants Richard back. Both of them know the version of Noah on the marquee is the version that has to go to LA next week.

The glass house in Joshua Tree: how Noah Kahan got his OCD diagnosis

In late 2024, Kahan went to Aaron Dessner's Long Pond Studio in upstate New York to start the next album. It didn't work. He flew to Joshua Tree in March 2025 and rented an all-glass Airbnb in the desert because he had decided he needed to be alone in a beautiful place to find the record.

He could not write. He had a "pretty severe episode" of intrusive thoughts. He drove a stretch of road and convinced himself he had hit a person, then drove it backward to check. He convinced himself he had said things he hadn't said. He sat inside the glass house and could not produce a song.

"I had just gotten diagnosed with OCD, and I was in Joshua Tree, and I was feeling so miserable. I'm in this beautiful Airbnb. I'm in the desert. I'm like — this isn't making me feel connected."

The setting is the joke. The Four flies to the most aesthetic version of solitude available and discovers he has brought himself with him. The all-glass Airbnb is, structurally, every Vermont bedroom he has ever written in. The view is different. The animal inside is the same.

After Joshua Tree, he came back, did the diagnostic work, and was prescribed Lexapro after Prozac and Zoloft hadn't quite landed. The Great Divide — written, in part, in the wreckage of that trip — was released April 24, 2026. It debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, the biggest streaming week of any album that year and the biggest week for a rock album in over a decade.

He had to fall apart in a glass house to make a No. 1 record about putting himself back together.

"Lexapro and I fell in love": why Noah Kahan was afraid to get better

That line contains the whole problem.

Kahan has said it twice in interviews. He grins when he says it. Lexapro and I fell in love — the phrasing tells you he had been mourning his suffering like a partner before it left.

For most artists, the obstacle to getting help is access, money, stigma, or side effects. For Kahan, it was none of those.

"I don't want to get help because I'm worried that I'll be happy and I won't care about making something, and I won't feel pain, and it won't be painful enough for my audience, and the feelings won't be real enough for my audience."

This is the Four's sealed room. The wound is the work. The work is the identity. To touch the wound is to risk the identity. Vincent van Gogh, the patron saint of the type, did not get help. The mythology Kahan grew up inside — the suffering artist, battered into greatness — argues that the misery is the price of the song. He believed it. He spent twenty years believing it.

"We look at people like Van Gogh and these famous artists that battered themselves to create, and we think that's how it has to be. I subscribed to that theory for a long time."

His producer Gabe Simon watched him refuse to put the wound down. Simon has worked with Kahan since the breakthrough and stayed with him through the worst of it — including a 2022 session for "The View Between Villages," the closing track of Stick Season, when Kahan was OCD-spiraling on TikTok analytics and tried to walk into the control room to delete everything they had just recorded.

"I told my engineer, 'I need you to lock that room right now.' I wasn't trying to be a dick — I'm doing my job."

The closer of his most important album exists because someone physically locked him out of the room where he could erase it.

The radical thing about The Great Divide is not that it's a more honest record than Stick Season. Stick Season was already painfully honest. The radical thing is that he made it on antidepressants, and it still works. By the end of those sessions, Simon was telling Rolling Stone something different: "He's in the healthiest place he's ever been. All these mental-health challenges, they're his superpowers."

The challenge had not gone away. The vise around it had loosened.

You can hear what Kahan does with that loosening in who he sings with. Stick Season (Forever), the deluxe edition released February 2024, was effectively a duet album: Brandi Carlile on "You're Gonna Go Far," Kacey Musgraves on "She Calls Me Back," Sam Fender on "Homesick," Lizzy McAlpine on "Call Your Mom," Gracie Abrams on "Everywhere, Everything," Post Malone on "Dial Drunk." His duet with Hozier on "Northern Attitude" — another Type 4 who built a career out of dressing grief in folk arrangements — sounds like two people trading hauntings. Olivia Rodrigo pulled him onstage at MSG to share "Stick Season." Fours collect emotional twins. The suggestions panel under this article is mostly his collaborators.

Noah Kahan and the Busyhead Project: how the wound became the work

In May 2023, between the rise of Stick Season and the collapse in Joshua Tree, Kahan founded the Busyhead Project — a 501(c)(3) that funnels concert revenue and a portion of merchandise sales into community-based mental health organizations. Two years in, the project had raised over $6.6 million and supported 170 organizations worldwide.

The Busyhead Project is what Type 4 integration to Type 1 looks like. When Fours grow, they move toward the Reformer. The melancholy gets a job. The ache becomes a structure. The shame becomes a service.

You could see the same thing happening live. At Fenway in July 2024 — two sold-out nights, around 38,000 people each — Kahan broke down crying mid-"Orange Juice" and stopped singing. The crowd finished the verse for him. He stood at the mic and let it happen. "Every day I think about playing fenway," he wrote later. "I can't even look at photos without crying." For an artist whose entire career runs on emotional permission, that's the proof of concept: the audience showed up to do the feeling with him, not at him.

This is also the part of his life Kahan can defend in front of his brother. Not Noah Kahan the superstar — Noah Kahan the person who used the superstar thing for something. The Busyhead Project resolves a problem he could never quite resolve onstage: how to be the famous one without it being only about him.

"These problems were really hard for me, and were disrupting my ability to wake up in the morning and just be a human being. But I was holding off on getting the help that I really needed for a long time."

The TIME essay, published in October 2023 and titled Putting Words to My Mental Health Struggles Saved Me, is the same gesture in essay form. The depersonalization episodes, he wrote, "allowed me to look at these painful, scary feelings of doubt, fear, shame, and depersonalization as symptoms of a studied problem, instead of defects of my soul."

Defects of the soul is the most Four phrasing he has ever published — and naming those defects as treatable symptoms is the only escape route the type has ever found.

What Noah Kahan is mourning when he sings about Vermont

Kahan keeps describing the new record as a "great divide." He means the silence between him and the people he came from — his father, his mother, his siblings, his hometown, the version of himself who hadn't done any of this yet. He stares across the divide. He says he wants to scream. He says his voice has gone hoarse from climbing.

A Four mourns the version of themselves they left on the other side of every change. Fours grieve futures, not just pasts. They grieve the boy who could have been a substitute teacher in Strafford if Spotify had never existed. Kahan got fingerprinted to substitute-teach. He looked at golf-course groundskeeper jobs — "I thought that would be such a therapeutic thing," he told Billboard. He thought, seriously, about quitting the most successful folk record of the decade because the success felt like it was happening to someone he wasn't.

He didn't quit. He took the meds. He made the documentary. He started telling his family the things he had previously only mythologized into songs. His mother, watching old home videos at the end of Out of Body, says quietly that the songwriting "humanized" the family. Meaning: he had spent a decade rendering them in lyrics. He had finally stopped long enough to render them as people.

The horses still stand in the flood. He still flies to LA next week. The album debuted at No. 1.

He used to want to be a horse.

He's learning to be a person who comes home.