“I am the least cool guy at the party right now”: Noah Kahan’s struggles with success

Noah Kahan is a chart-topping, Grammy-nominated star, but he admits that his recent success is giving him more anxiety as well as a bad case of imposter syndrome.

When he was at the Grammys, Noah told The Guardian, “I was sitting by myself, like: ‘Whoa, I am the least cool guy at the party right now’ … [i]t played into this idea that I have about myself – which isn’t healthy – that I don’t belong.”  He added, “It’s one of those things that I need to work on, finding out how to feel deserving and worthy.”

“It feels too simple that I’ve made music that I really care about, that I’m proud of, and it’s connected with people. To me, there has to be some underlying dark force that’s fabricating this,” he laughed.

In a separate interview with The New Yorker, Noah expounded on this feeling, explaining, “It’s hard to describe how lonely it is to have everybody think that you’re succeeding, and to feel that you’re barely managing.”

“I’m so f*****’ lucky and privileged to be in this position,” he added. “But I still feel like every other human being: stress, anxiety. Recently, I’ve felt more of that than I’ve wanted to.”

Another source of his stress, he told The Guardian, is that he’s afraid his success will keep him from writing the kinds of songs that made him famous.

“How am I supposed to pretend that I’m sitting in my dad’s house wishing I could get out of there? I’m getting hair and makeup done and someone’s handed me a coffee,” he noted. “I don’t think I’m living a very relatable experience to a lot of people.”

Then again, he admitted, “I didn’t think Vermont was going to be relatable, necessarily.”

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