Noah Kahan, the Grammy-nominated singer behind Stick Season, married Brenna Nolan on Saturday 23 August 2025 at the Strafford Town House in Vermont. The hall was built in 1799, and the town has held its annual meeting there every March since 1801. For the rest of the year Strafford rents it out. The couple had their reception in the same room.
A fair number of people in Strafford, population 1,100, knew the wedding was coming, and word stayed in town. The first account ran five days later in the White River Valley Herald, the weekly paper there, which reported that residents had given the couple the privacy they wanted. Kahan’s representative confirmed the marriage to People on 2 September 2025, calling it “an intimate ceremony in their home state of Vermont on August 23rd”. The statement asked that no photographs, video or other details go out unless the couple released them. A year on, none have appeared.
In the time since, Kahan has spoken about the marriage in public once.
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Who is Noah Kahan’s wife, Brenna Nolan?
Kahan was born in Strafford on 1 January 1997 and went to school across the river in Hanover, New Hampshire. Nolan grew up in the same cluster of towns, known locally as the Upper Valley, and went to the same high school. Her social accounts are private and she has not spoken to the press.
They were living together well before any of this started. A People profile published the day Stick Season came out in October 2022 put Kahan in Watertown, Massachusetts, with his girlfriend and a German shepherd called Penny.
Neither of them has said when the relationship began, and Kahan has never said how they met. The claim that the two have been together since 2014, which Wikipedia gives as fact, rests on a single Instagram post from June that year, a photograph of a child on an outdoor chair, captioned “#tbt”. Kahan has never identified who is in it. The only comment he left underneath is a reply to his sister, who asked whether it was her. “Not you,” he wrote.
Nolan spoke publicly for the first time in Noah Kahan: Out of Body, the Netflix documentary released on 13 April 2026. She is on screen for about half a minute. Sitting beside Kahan in the Nashville house they had bought, she tells him she never doubted he would make a career out of music, then describes the life she had expected instead.
“I was like, ‘I’m gonna be a teacher the rest of my life.’ And you would, like, tour your small venues. That’s just what I thought our lives would be.”
Those are the only words she has said in public about her own working life. She has been described as a photographer, a filmmaker and a charity worker. None of those claims is sourced to anything.
How word of the engagement got out
Kahan proposed on 17 July 2023, during a trip to Cabo San Lucas in Mexico, and said nothing about it in public.
The first sign came nine months later. A fan bought a special edition pressing of Stick Season (We’ll All Be Here Forever), opened the sleeve, found a dedication page addressed to his fiancรฉe and filmed it for TikTok. “To my fiancรฉe, you’re the air I breathe,” it began.
In October 2024, in a long Instagram post marking the end of the Stick Season tour, Kahan thanked “my fiancรฉ” in a list that also named his parents, siblings, band, management and crew.
| Date | What happened |
|---|---|
| 17 July 2023 | Kahan proposes in Cabo San Lucas |
| 24 October 2023 | The couple’s first public appearance, at the TIME100 Next Gala in New York |
| April 2024 | A fan finds the vinyl dedication and posts it to TikTok |
| July 2024 | Nolan joins Kahan’s family onstage at Fenway Park |
| October 2024 | Kahan thanks “my fiancรฉ” on Instagram |
| 2 February 2025 | The couple attend the Grammys |
| 23 August 2025 | They marry at the Strafford Town House |
| 13 April 2026 | Nolan speaks publicly for the first time, in the Netflix film |
| 24 April 2026 | Kahan mentions his wife in an album announcement |
The one time he has spoken about the marriage came on that last date, the morning his fourth album was released. Writing about how hard The Great Divide had been to finish, he said he had been guided through it by “the steady and loving touch of my wife and family”.
The town that kept the wedding quiet
When Billboard ran the wedding news on 3 September 2025, the reporter Gil Kaufman left the bride’s name out and told readers why. “Billboard is not naming Kahan’s wife out of respect for her privacy,” he wrote. The Herald had printed it six days earlier, with the date and the venue. People and NBC have both since run long pieces about her using her first name only.
Strafford has done this before. Daniel Day-Lewis married Rebecca Miller there in 1996, and that wedding was also widely known in town beforehand. Thirty years on, nobody has filled in the details.
Fans drive out to photograph the road signs named in Kahan’s songs, and some take the signs home. One went missing from Alger Brook Road in June 2026, and his mother told a selectboard meeting she would pay for a replacement and would ask her son to post something telling people to stop. A month before the wedding he had already asked fans to stay off his family’s property, saying his relatives are “real normal people who live and work in their homes”.
The documentary that leaves the wedding out
Kahan has built a career on writing about his family. In Out of Body, his mother Lauri Berkenkamp goes through Stick Season naming which lines belong to which of her children, and says that since the album came out people know everything about their lives. Near the end of the film he tells her he should have warned them he was airing the dirty laundry, and that he could have done a better job of checking everyone was comfortable with it.
The documentary runs 94 minutes and covers his OCD diagnosis, his parents’ divorce and the brain injury his father suffered when Kahan was in eighth grade. It never mentions that he had married the previous August.
The marriage appears once, and as a joke. Showing the camera around the Nashville house, Kahan points at a framed photograph standing among his awards, calls it his greatest trophy, then pretends not to recognise himself in it. “This is Brenna’s boyfriend proposing to her,” he says, before giving the date and the place.
The credits roll over him playing “Doors”, a song about a man who keeps his partner at arm’s length.
Does Noah Kahan have children?
No. He told Rolling Stone in May 2026 that he thinks about having children someday, and that he worries about passing his own difficulties on to a child.
In the same interview he explained why his wife stays out of the songs. “My wife is very private and really desires that privacy,” he said. One track on The Great Divide, “We Go Way Back”, is about her, and it is the only one he has said is about her.
Are Noah Kahan and Brenna Nolan still married?
Yes. Nothing has been reported since the wedding to suggest otherwise, and Kahan referred to her as his wife as recently as April 2026.
The first anniversary fell on 23 August 2026, and no outlet marked it. Kahan finished the North American leg of his first stadium tour at T-Mobile Park in Seattle eight days after that. The long thank-you post he wrote on 4 September named his crew, his venues, his opening acts and his fans, and not his wife.
He opens the Australian leg in Melbourne this week and is nominated for an MTV Video Music Award on Sunday. April 2026 produced more about this marriage than the two years before it, and he has said he still has not worked out how much he wants to share.
