Noah Kahan says some of his most inspired musical moments happen on the toilet.
The Stick Season singer has revealed he often ends up writing while sitting on the loo because the acoustics are great and the absurdity makes his fans laugh.
He told the BBC: “The bathroom has really good acoustics, 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.”
But behind the jokes, Kahan revealed he’d been battling a much heavier reality, including battling OCD.
He admitted he’d been struggling on stage.
He said: “I was always on stage thinking ‘When is this going to end? How am I going to do this again?’ instead of the thousands of people that were there – and that was really sad and lonely.”
Songwriting, usually his emotional lifeline, suddenly became another source of pressure.
He explained: “Usually when things are hard, I can write a song to navigate out of it, but every time I sat down to write, I would think, ‘What’s this going to sound like when it’s released? Are people going to like this?'” he said. He started dozens of tracks, only to abandon them as his confidence collapsed.”
The runaway success of viral hit Stick Season only made the block worse.
He went on: “It was hard, because my biggest song, Stick Season, was written so quickly. I felt like I was failing because the process wasn’t the same.”
Kahan – who has documented his struggles in the Netflix documentary Noah Kahan: Out of Body – even tried escaping to Joshua Tree last March in the hope that a change of scenery would spark something, but the trip backfired.
He said: “It was so clichéd. I was like, ‘The desert will help me understand myself’. Then I got out there and I felt even worse than before.”
With nothing shifting his mindset, he said he reached a point where he felt he’d run out of ideas.
Back home, he was diagnosed with OCD and stopped writing for a month — something he described as “horrifying”.
He said: “I got too attached to this idea that my value came from what I created… this obsession of being successful and talented and having everything be perfect became really, really impossible for me to contend with.”
The turning point came when he agreed to go back on medication.
He explained: “I tortured myself for years not going on medication because I didn’t know if I could make music if I’m happier.”
Lexapro, he explained, gave him space from obsessive thoughts: “It helped me realise I don’t need to be in pain to make music.”
With his head clearer, he revisited his demos and discovered he hadn’t been blocked at all — he had nearly 40 songs.
Some of them were finished in the same unlikely place where the whole journey began: the bathroom.
He said: “If I sit in a chair and look in the mirror, it almost feels like I’m writing with someone else in the room.
“It’s kind of weird.”
