Noah Kahan's Stick Season

Sort of a music review

Photo/album art credit: Noah Kahan

I’ve listened to Noah Kahan’s album, Stick Season, over and over. I don’t do such a thing often. I rarely listen to songs on repeat, and I don’t often sit through a whole album at a time. I felt compelled by something inside of me, however, to listen to this album and listen to it again, to understand the songs, to get to know them so well that they are no longer strangers, but intimate friends.

Each song recalls a different cinematic memory, sends it playing before my mind’s eye: “The View Between Villages” conjures up the open blue-and-green of Caroline, New York, spotted with white and red signs declaring that it is not, never has been, and never will be a place that needs zoning laws. “Orange Juice” has followed me through so many mundane pieces of my day that the memories it recalls spin like a kaleidoscope. “Stick Season” reminds me of my nephew, who would fall asleep to it as a lullaby. “Northern Attitude” calls to mind an argument I had with my brother about why we did and didn’t like Noah’s music (I love the song, he doesn’t).

Noah has put a lot of himself into his craft, and I see a similarity between what is in my heart and what is in his songs. That’s one of the most appealing aspects of art for me: an artist shares my experience, my attitude, my thoughts or my questions. Then they put that shared phenomenon into a work I can experience in a completely new way. These artists have something that is the same as what I have, and they put it on display in a manner that only they can. As a result, I experience something both intimately familiar and wholly new at the same time.

The art that I love most is that which is a manifestation of something that has been in my soul, but I didn’t know was there. Such art reflects myself back to me, but a self that I don’t immediately recognize, a self I have to get acquainted with.

Graham Greene is one artist who has accomplished this. His work showed me the part of myself that wondered what love meant, that abhorred its substitutions, that had grown sick with longing for something real, desperate for “a love that just exists and doesn’t want,” just like James in Greene’s play, The Potting Shed.

Noah Kahan is another. First, he reflected back to me an experience that is easy to recognize as my own: growing up in New England. But then he showed me parts of myself that I didn’t realize were mine, such as the kind of unseemly anger that tempts you to become cynical, sarcastic, and bitter to avoid the threat of losing love, and the conflict that takes root when you love a place that you know almost killed you.

In “The View Between Villages,” Kahan describes the torrent of emotions he feels when he returns to the small town he grew up in:

“A minute from home but I feel so far from it
The death of my dog, the stretch of my skin
It's all washin' over me, I'm angry again
The things that I lost here, the people I knew
They got me surrounded for a mile or two”

This is something I’m surprised to recognize almost immediately. It’s oppressive and terrifying, returning to a place that shaped you once you’ve realized you don’t like that shape. The memories are at war with each other and you’re at war with yourself: how do you separate the painful times from the good ones? How do you assuage the anger at what was done to you? Is it worth it to do so? How do you appreciate the good memories? What do you say to the people who tried to love you, even if they failed?

Do you just grin and bear it, refuse to burn bridges, refuse to feel, as Kahan’s narrator describes in “Growing Sideways”? It’s one way out:

“And I divvied up my anger into thirty separate parts
Keep the bad shit in my liver and the rest around my heart….
I ignore things, and I move sideways
Until I forget what I felt in the first place
At the end of the day I know there are worse ways
To stay alive
'Cause everyone's growing and everyone's healthy
I'm terrified that I might never have met me
Oh, if my engine works perfect on empty
I guess I'll drive”

Or do you hope that your friends and family will stick by you after you’ve left and changed? When saving yourself means destroying the person that nearly everyone knew you to be growing up, do you dare? Do you allow yourself to hope that you can return home to people who have made room for the you that you’ve become, like the narrator in “Orange Juice”?

This is my favorite song, both for its storytelling and the powerful love it describes. The narrator accepts that his friend has given up drinking, has changed everything about himself, guilt-ridden after emerging as the only survivor of a drunk-driving accident. The narrator welcomes his friend home after his self-imposed exile, but he doesn’t offer forgiveness as a bargaining piece to get his friend back. This is because forgiveness isn’t part of the equation for him. All he wants is to give space, to give a home for his friend to return to so that he can forgive himself. The narrator gently tells this friend:

“Honey, come over, the party's gone slower
And no one will tempt you, we know you got sober
There's orange juice in the kitchen, bought for the children
It's yours if you want it, we're just glad you could visit”

It’s a powerful thing, hoping for this kind of acceptance: it can keep the bitterness from engulfing you entirely. It’s the hope that when you insist that you are completely changed, that you can’t be loved by the same people anymore because you no longer resemble anything that you used to be, you will be proven wrong. It’s the hope that someone will argue with you, that someone will care so much that they will fight against losing you, asking,

“Are we all just crows to you now?
Are we all just pulling you down?”

And insisting,

“You didn’t put those bones in the ground”