- Noah Kahan recently spoke to Insider about his third album, "Stick Season," out Friday.
- The 14 songs were largely inspired by Kahan's "complicated" feelings about growing up in New England.
Historically, if you were to hear someone in New England mention "Stick Season," it wouldn't be cause for celebration.
"It's the time between peak foliage and Halloween and the first snow — when all the leaves are off the trees. It's a time of transition. And it's super depressing," Noah Kahan explained during a Zoom call with Insider in late September.
"I can't even enjoy fall because I know it just means that winter is coming soon and it creates a lot of anxiety," he added. "So people in Vermont say, 'It's Stick Season,' and no one really likes it."
The singer-songwriter was born and raised in Strafford, Vermont, a small town with a population of barely more than 1,000. Save for a few adolescent years in New Hampshire, it's where Kahan has spent the majority of his 25 years on Earth.
So it may come as a surprise that his third studio album, out Friday, is titled "Stick Season." It's a tribute to Kahan's roots as much as it's an exhumation — a painstaking process to unearth old memories, hang-ups, and coffins buried in the garden of his childhood home on Balch Street.
"If I get too close and I'm not how you hoped / Forgive my northern attitude, oh, I was raised out in the cold," he sings in the opener. Later, in the album highlight "Homesick," he describes his hometown as "such great motivation for anyone trying to move the fuck away from hibernation."
Throughout the tracklist, Kahan contemplates running away and never looking back. He frets about friends who have already managed it. He grapples with his temper and resentment — towards his parents, their parents, and generations of small-town insulation.
Other songs, however, sound like love letters to dirt roads, preteen scars, and high-school sweethearts. Despite everything, Kahan said he feels "called" to Vermont, constantly aware of its "magnetic force."
"I have a really complicated relationship with where I'm from, just like anybody does," Kahan said. "I was surrounded by nature growing up, which lent itself to an appreciation for space and nature, but also an understanding of what it's like to be isolated and to be alone."
"I think a lot of people hear my music and they're like, 'This is just chill folk vibes,'" he added towards the end of our conversation. "But I'm a human being. I'm feeling real emotion, I'm feeling angry, I'm feeling scared all the time, and those are things I work through."
'I wanted to write songs about the feeling of being left behind'
Kahan began writing songs when he was just 8 years old. His parents were both very supportive of his poetic ambitions; his mother was an author and his dad taught him to play guitar.
"I never had any other plans for myself besides being a musician," Kahan said.
After a few years of performing at open mics and talent shows, Kahan was courted by record labels when they discovered his original compositions on SoundCloud. ("They had 2,500 views," he quipped. "I don't know how they found them.") He was signed to Republic Records when he was 18 years old, before he'd even graduated high school.
"I've always felt an intense nostalgia for that time, like there's been something missing from my life. I didn't go to college and have those four years and my childhood ended in Vermont," he said, adding, "I wanted to write songs about the feeling of being left behind."
On "Stick Season," Kahan tracks the ripple effects of youth and those early, formative brushes with intimacy — like falling in love for the first time ("Strawberry Wine") or inviting a new friend into your world ("Come Over").
"My dad was a triathlete. He would always be wearing spandex and those funny helmets that go all the way back," Kahan recalled. "I was always like, 'No man, no one's going to want to come over. My family's weird, I'm weird. My place isn't as nice as everybody else's.'"
"I feel like a lot of people feel that, no matter what your house looks like, or what your family actually looks like," he continued. "I wanted to write about that feeling, that vulnerability, and opening yourself up to letting people into the private parts of your life."
In these stripped-back guitar ballads, Kahan's delicate plucks and sensitive lyrics recall the best of the Avett Brothers — or perhaps a less reverent, more anxious Hozier. Other songs on the tracklist, like "Northern Attitude" and "The View Between Villages," boast the determined strums and spectral harmonies of early Mumford & Sons.
Although Kahan cited '70s icons like Cat Stevens and Paul Simon as influences, his own style of heart-on-the-sleeve songwriting seems to scratch a distinctly modern itch. "Stick Season," the album's titular track, went viral on TikTok earlier this year, soundtracking thousands of clips and drawing millions of likes.
"I've released tons of songs that I thought were going to be really good, and they didn't do anything," Kahan said. "So I wasn't putting my eggs in any baskets, really."
"Then it got to the point where people were using the sound but turning the volume all the way down, just because it's going to boost the algorithm. I was like, 'OK, this song is really doing well,'" he continued, grinning sheepishly. "It really connected with people."
Kahan's music speaks to the power of vulnerability and the 'female gaze'
One recent TikTok with over 1 million views cites "Stick Season" as a song that has the female creator in a "chokehold," alongside "Something in the Orange" by Zach Bryan and "anything by Bon Iver."
"I love me a yearning man. It is my favorite genre of music. It makes me lose my mind," the caption reads. "I'm obsessed. I will always be obsessed. They should release a holy book of lyrics from these songs and structure it like religious text."
Indeed, the virality of "Stick Season" speaks to the power of the female gaze in art and pop culture — that is to say, the value women place on emotional intelligence, a stereotypically feminine quality, and the connection we feel to men who embrace it.
Folk has always been dominated by male singer-songwriters, but women in pop are still disproportionately expected to pour personal details into their music, to mine their trauma for proof of their pain. It still feels rare and sacred to hear a man express true vulnerability.
Kahan has mastered this difficult and poignant kind of lyricism. "Stick Season" sounds like going for a drive with an old friend through a barren forest and feeling completely safe in the passenger seat.
It's also the first album in Kahan's catalog that he coproduced.
"I had such a vision for it, such a specific story I wanted to tell, that when I got in the studio I found myself not being able to just let the process pass me by at all," he said. "I felt like I had to be very involved in every single piece. I wanted to get it just right."
Of course, real people and experiences form the bedrock of the album's 14 stories. (For those inclined to ask about "All My Love," it was James Blake's "Retrograde" that shook the frame of the car: "I would listen to it in my dad's driveway at night when it was snowing and my brother could hear the fucking base coming through my speakers from the house.")
But Kahan will freely admit he's an unreliable narrator. As he sings in the title track: "It's half my fault, but I just like to play the victim."
"Any story told by anybody is going to be biased because it's one person's recollection and I wanted that to be a part of this record," he explained. "I like that people can explore their own ideas about a situation instead of having it be this cut-and-dry thing."
That vision already came to life when "Stick Season" caught fire online. Many of the covers it inspired, including a personal favorite by Maisie Peters, reimagined the lyrics from the perspective of the girl who kept on driving and left Kahan behind. ("It's half my fault, but I've always held my hands up," her rendition goes. "You're a tortured soul and I'm what's left of your fan club.")
Perhaps a less secure artist would balk at this accusation, at such an audacious script flip, but Kahan showed zero interest in protecting his ego. Instead, he gushed about the countless versions of himself and his words that fans have dreamt up.
"The coolest thing about music is allowing people to interpret it their own way," he said. "It allows the song to have its own life over and over again."
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