Stick Season (Forever)

Album Review

Noah Kahan never asked for this.

A Grammy nomination for Best New Artist. The double Platinum certification for his album, Stick Season. The accompanying two-year tour that’s grown to resemble Taylor Swift’s unending Eras Tour.

Kahan’s rise from obscurity to acclaim is slightly odd considering his background. Born in a small town with less than 2,000 people, Kahan’s upbringing was relatively quiet, simple, and normal–at least to him.

Kahan has cited his family as the primary influence on his personality and his music. For Kahan, conversations at family dinners shifted from the latest Boston Red Sox game to how to cope with depression in the brutal winters of the Northeast, or “stick season” as it is referred to by its residents.

Stick Season (Forever) captures the essence of storytelling: tragedy, heartbreak, and the search for hope.

His popularity is in part due to the nostalgia his music awakens for fans of folk music. Rather than incessantly trying to be cool, his songs are painfully honest and, at times, brutal in their transparency.  

As he relays his personal battles with depression and anxiety, his methods of coping include binge drinking, getting high with friends, drunken fist fights, and lonesome nights with lovers. And at the height of his success, Kahan is finding that his problems and questions haven’t gone away.

POSITIVE CONTENT

As his career has developed, Kahan channeled the conversations he had as a kid into his music. He credits his family’s openness about mental health as a driving force behind not only his lyrics but the proceeds of his concerts benefitting mental health organizations.

The fingerprints of his support for mental health services are dotted across the entire album, especially on such songs as “Orange Juice,” “Growing Sideways,” “Homesick,” and “New Perspective.”

In interviews, Kahan has shared his struggles with sobriety, medication, and his personal mental health. He’s sought professional help and found release through making music. Even though some lyrics feature his characteristic anger and bitterness, there are also glimmers of hope and compassion.

At times, Stick Season peels back the curtain on Kahan’s relationships to reveal his growth, such as when he says, “It’s okay, there ain’t a drop of bad blood / It’s all my love, you got all my love.”

“Everywhere, Everything” features a deeply dedicated version of Kahan as he sings, “I want to love you till we’re food for the worms to eat/till our fingers decompose” emphasizing the unbreakable bond of his love.

Aided by voicemail recordings from family members, “The View Between Villages” is Kahan at his most transparent. He’s returned to the place he grew up and reflects on how much he’s changed as well as the people and places he once knew so intimately. Through the song’s emotional swells, we feel Kahan’s pain but also his hope at second chances.

CONTENT CONCERNS

The title track, “Stick Season” serves as the thematic statement for the album. In this song, Kahan telegraphs the hopelessness and anger that persists in his life. He smokes weed, he gets drunk, he comes home for Christmas expecting his friends to help him. He’s clearly hurting, and his version of solving his pain is futile.

Stick Season (Forever) is the extended version of Kahan’s original album. With an additional 16 songs, the album balloons and features a lineup that would rival the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Kahan re-records several songs with popular artists such as Post Malone, Gracie Abrams, Hozier, Kacey Musgraves, Brandi Carlile, and Gregory Alan Isakov.

Several of these new versions of his songs feature additional verses by the accompanying artist with added concerns.

In “Dial Drunk,” Post Malone contributes the line, “F— that, sir, just let me call” when talking to a police officer who has arrested him for participation in a drunken fight at a bar.

In “Northern Attitude,” Kahan and Hozier sing about their unabashed commitment to stereotypical Northeast behavior such as, “getting stoned” and “getting lost, getting high.”  

The songs: “Come Over,” “Orange Juice,” and “Growing Sideways” make up a trio of reflections on sobriety and addiction.  There are references to misusing medication originally prescribed for depression and relying on alcohol to soothe one’s pain. In a moment of honesty, Kahan sings, “feels good to be sad” and “So I took my medication and I poured my trauma out.”

He continues to describe trips to visit his therapist saying, “We argued about Jesus, finally found some middle ground” and “I divvied up my anger into 30 separate parts/Keep the bad sh-t in my liver and the rest around my heart.”

For Kahan, there are three responses to his trauma: fight, medicate, and ignore. Usually in that order. The album mirrors this pattern. Songs about his fights for meaning are bookended by songs about the futility of medicine as a salve. And that eventually leads to songs where he ignores his pain altogether in a last ditch effort to make it all go away.

The cyclical nature of addiction and loss isn’t something reserved only for Kahan. Several songs, such as “You’re Gonna Go Far” and “Call Your Mom” serve as conversations between Kahan and his various partners sifting through the remains of their relationships. As they accuse each other of failing, fall in and out of love, and navigate their vices, they ultimately realize that there’s more than enough blame for each of them. 

“Your Needs, My Needs” touches on the haunting guilt of watching someone you love wither away in the wake of their excess and painful lifestyle. Kahan visualizes his former love as a ghost slowly dying, “To see a friend, to see a ghost/bitter-brained, always drunk/rail-thin, Zoloft/subtle change, shorter days.”

Across the album there are several uses (and variations of) the s-word, as well as instances of of misusing God’s name.” There are also several references to sex such as “we’d shake the frame of your car” and “There was heaven in your eyes/I was not baptized.”

ALBUM SUMMARY

I didn’t have to look hard to notice it.

I was at a Noah Kahan concert in Colorado. The audience was typical for a folk show; men and women on dates, college students, fathers with their daughters, mothers with their sons all dotting the concert hall.

Yet, in pockets of the room, I saw dozens of grown men softly crying. Their emotions stirred by something unspoken beyond Kahan’s lyrics and performance.

Fervent listeners of Kahan are drawn to his music through his shared language of how we deal with anxiety, loneliness, being homesick, going through breakups, and self-destructive tendencies. These and more make up the common experiences of Gen-Z and Gen-Alpha, which happen to be Kahan’s primary fanbases. 

In my opinion, most of Kahan’s songs contain enough nuance and self-referential mythology of depression and anxiety that would go over a middle school or high school student’s head.

That said, as Kahan would likely agree, words have power. These songs are deep pools of reflection. A caution to any listener that diving too deep could unintentionally trigger strong emotions if you personally struggle with depression, anxiety, anger, or broken relationships.

Stick Season (Forever) poses other problems too. The songs commend behavior that searches for blame other than ownership. Whether it’s a failing relationship or an addiction, Kahan’s worldview is centered on pointing the finger rather than looking in the mirror first.

The lasting images of Kahan’s album are the symbols of nature and the seasons of change. After all, “stick season” isn’t intended to last forever. Each year, spring will arrive and with it so will the promise of change and new seasons.

But what if it doesn’t?

Kahan’s made it clear that he’s entrenched in his past and bound to his mistakes. If we’re not careful, we’ll become just like Kahan, trapped in our own stick seasons forever.

But his music—and perhaps the nature of music—holds out hope, too.

After the show ended, I couldn’t help but notice the way people left the concert. They were together. I’m not sure how each person entered the concert, but no one was leaving alone. What Kahan had done brought these people closer together. There were arms after arms wrapped around each other as groups split up under a Colorado moon.

Music will do that sometimes. Give words to the indescribable feelings of pain. Though, as Kahan would likely be the first to say, the feelings of relief and reprieve after a concert rarely last. In a few hours, you’ll be left searching for something meaningful all over again.