“When I was living at home in Vermont after high school, I was super, super lonely, obviously, but also just kind of socially not developed,” he says. It was always something that was foreboding, and stick season, in that time between the stunning autumn in Vermont and New Hampshire, became this cold, gray, empty place.” Those experiences are the narrative thread of Stick Season, which unfolds as equal parts eulogy and exhumation-a layer-by-layer cataloging of childhood memories, heartbreak, and resentments toward the claustrophobia of small-town living. “I had the worst times in my childhood, in my life, in the wintertime. “Every year growing up, my entire family would really, really dread winter coming,” Kahan explains. Kahan is deeply familiar with this cycle of transition and rebirth, but it wasn’t until much later that he realized how deeply he was impacted by the changing of the seasons.
The sun vanishes, the temperatures plummet, and the world slows to a crawl. Winters in New England are famously brutal. Those things were present before I finished, which was really nice and helpful to guide the whole process.” I was really happy to have that narrative through line figured out early on. Once I had three or four songs that I thought could make up an album, telling the rest of the story became very natural, and a really focused experience. “I looked back at the rest of the tunes, and they all fit this theme about home and about isolation. “It wasn't until I wrote the song ‘Stick Season’ after a session that I realized I was making an album,” Kahan shared with Apple Music’s Hanuman Welch. According to Kahan, it’s “super depressing”-but it was also super inspiring.
For some, this period, with its changing leaves and trick-or-treating in New England, is idyllic. Bon Iver and James Blake were the soundtrack of his long, snowy winters in Vermont, and the term “stick season” refers to the time between autumnal splendor and the season’s first snowfall. Kahan was looking to take a break from the more polished, pop-leaning writing sessions he’d been doing and found himself gravitating towards the music of his childhood. Noah Kahan’s third album, October 2022’s Stick Season, was never meant to be a full-length project.
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