A Love Letter to Noah Kahan’s Stick Season
Released on October 14th, Noah Kahan’s latest album transcends just being defined as good music. Stick Season is instead in a league of its own for the comfort it provides in the coldest of climates - both literal and mental.
The indie folk resurgence is in full force with the release of Stick Season, and Noah Kahan is leading the charge as he’s received immense support across the internet for the wistful and melancholic lyricism featured throughout the fifty-five minute album. Kahan built the folk of Stick Season from the ground up after heading back home to Vermont when COVID-19 hit, allowing the mountainous terrain of his home to inspire his divergence from previous indie pop records. Fear of change gave way to immense support as Kahan began to tease the later critically acclaimed singles “Northern Attitude” and “Stick Season,” which kick off the album and immediately immerse listeners into Kahan’s distinctly earnest storytelling of his home in New England and the ways it has shaped him.
The 12 tracks following the introductory singles continue Kahan’s plight between fury and fondness for his youth, his northern demeanor, and the ways that his hometown continues to impact him to this day. Stand out track “Growing Sideways” was heavily teased in the weeks leading up to the release of Stick Season, with introductory lyrics “So I took my medication and I poured my trauma out / On some sad-eyed middle aged man's overpriced new leather couch / And we argued about Jesus, finally found some middle ground / I said ‘I’m cured’” immediately striking a chord for listeners in his teaser TikToks. Other highlights include “All My Love,” a chronicle of caring towards someone no longer in Kahan’s life as he recounts still being there for them and holding no bad blood, as well as “Orange Juice” which discusses a person’s struggles through addiction and alcoholism with a fond and caring hand. The final track of Stick Season finds as close to a resolution as possible for Kahan’s hour-long discussion of love, loss, and the ways one looks in both directions while heading home in “The View Between Villages”. This closing finds Kahan in his most stripped back sense, a fleeting ballad invigorating the love and hate one feels towards the place that built them, quite literally painting the picture of that one final road leading up to your hometown that simultaneously feels like a safe haven and a layer of hell.
There is something so impossibly nostalgic about Stick Season and the ache it leaves within me. I have never lived in New England, and as a native Ohioan, I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a stick season before this album. Despite this, I find myself homesick for both a life I have not led and a mental state I have not left, and Kahan’s expert weave of visceral storytelling and homely folk production grants both of these experiences a safe space for an hour. The poignant discussion of the trauma home can bring is powerful and far too relatable, but through it all, neither Kahan nor the listener are able to stop a slight romanticization of the life they have grown up with, no matter where the listener may be from. This album is definitively at the top of my list of releases this year, and I genuinely don’t know that any music I hear in the future will be able to replicate the resident magic and misery that Stick Season has taken up within the very fibres of my being.
In short, there is a lot of music that speaks to the soul, but Noah Kahan’s alpine reverence and wistfulness contained in Stick Season sits firmly in the marrow of my bones and hollow of my chest in ways that I cannot properly articulate. I cannot possibly recommend this album enough. No matter who you are and where you’re from, I can promise you will find yourself at home in the season of the sticks.
