You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishikesh Herway.

This episode contains explicit language.

Noah Khan is a singer and songwriter from Stratford for mod. Last year in 2022, he released Stixie's his third record.

The title track from that record went viral on TikTok when Noah was first writing it and posting pieces of it.

One of those videos has over 10 million plays and as of this recording on Spotify, the full song has almost 100 million streams.

For this episode, Noah talked to me about the process of making that song, what led him to post half a song on TikTok and what happened after that.

You'll hear the raw recordings off his phone, the different drafts he made as he worked.

You'll hear the version C first shared on social media.

And you'll hear his bracingly honest appraisal of the winding path he took in his life and in his music to get to where he is now.

I'm a singer.

My name is Noah Khan.

I graduated high school and I got a record deal when I was a senior and I had the kind of decide between going to Tulane and New Orleans or taking this record deal.

It was a pretty easy choice. I was never a great student.

I never really applied myself and kind of just fucked around in school.

I didn't think college was going to be something that was beneficial for me and my parents were kind of like, hey, this is so expensive.

If you can get a record deal and go pursue music, then do it.

But ultimately I was such a fledgling artist and fledgling signing for the company that it wasn't like a immediate rise of stardom.

It was kind of like, go back to your parents house and start writing some songs and building up the portfolio.

I didn't realize that it was going to be such a long process of development.

And a lot of that development was spent in Strapherd.

So, stick season kind of goes back almost three years now.

Stick season is between autumn and winter where all the leaves drop the trees.

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