Is it just me? I can’t be the only one.
For the past few weeks, my feed has become a Noah Kahan highlight reel. Live concert clips. Promos for his new Netflix documentary. Backstage videos. Fans crying in stadium nosebleeds. The algorithm has decided I need this man in my life, and honestly, it’s not all wrong.
There’s a sliver of a parallel universe where I might have been Noah. Not the talent or the voice, but the path. In college I played in a band, and the guy who went on to manage Noah (Drew Simmons of Foundation Artists) did a little management work with us back in the proverbial day. It was a millisecond of overlap. A door in a long hallway of doors. He walked through one. I walked through another, and I am genuinely, completely happy with where mine led. But every now and then, when Noah’s voice reaches me through my speakers, I think about that hallway.
I cannot imagine what it must have felt like to sell out Fenway two nights in a row. To stand on that field, in that city, and hear thousands of voices singing your songs back at you.
But here is what gets me about Noah Kahan, and why I think he resonates the way he does.
He is real.
Honest. Reflective. Relatable. There is a rawness to his energy that is likable and approachable. It comes through in his music, and it comes through in every interview he gives. He talks about anxiety, depression, therapy, his weird-kid childhood, the panic of fame, the absurdity of his own success. He cracks self-deprecating jokes. He admits the hard stuff. He sounds like a real person, not someone performing the part of a famous person.
Source: Noah Kahan via Facebook
That is the thing about authenticity. People can detect it instantly. They can also detect its absence.
His nonprofit, The Busyhead Project, is named after his 2019 debut album and is dedicated to ending the stigma around mental health and expanding access to care. Since launching in 2023, it has raised more than $6.6 million and supported 170 community-based organizations around the world. He livestreamed those Fenway shows to benefit the work. He sets up Action Villages outside his venues so fans can leave anonymous notes about what they are carrying. The mission is woven into the music.
That is not promoting a brand image. That is a person who actually believes the thing he is saying.
What this means for the rest of us
We work with a lot of clients in higher education and mission-driven spaces, and the same pattern keeps showing up. The institutions that break through are the ones brave enough to sound like themselves. Three things stand out.
Authenticity is detectable. So is its absence. People have dialed-in BS meters. They can sense when something is marketing copy dressed up to look like conviction, and they can sense the opposite. When a story is told from the heart and from the gut, it lands differently. It travels further. It earns a kind of trust that no amount of polish can manufacture. The polish, in fact, is often the giveaway.
Most institutions sound exactly like each other. Walk through a hundred college websites and you will read the same words. Transformation. Community. Possibility. Real-world experience. If your messaging could be copied, pasted onto your closest competitor’s site, and no one would notice, you do not have a brand voice yet. You have a category vocabulary. The Noah Kahan lesson is direct. The voice that breaks through is the voice that is unmistakably yours, even when it is imperfect, even when it is small, even when it is a little weird. Especially when it is a little weird.
Mission woven. This is the Busyhead lesson. Noah’s mental health advocacy is more than a side project. It is the same sentence as the music. The strongest institutional brands work the same way. Mission, identity, and differentiation are not three things you have to hold in tension. They are one thing, told well. When your purpose lives inside your story rather than next to it, every touchpoint starts pulling in the same direction.
The world is not trying to trip you up. The world wants to root for you. But it can only root for you if it can recognize you. The clearer and truer you are about who you are, the easier it becomes for the right audience to find you and stay with you.
So if you are sitting on a brand voice that lacks differentiation or a clear value proposition, take that as your sign.
Sing the song that only you can sing.
The world is listening.
