Noah Kahan’s Stick Season Speaks to the Mental Health of Young Adults Through Powerful Folk Lyrics

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​When thinking about how relatable songs are, and how this affects their commercial success, one may not believe that the lyrics of a man from a town with a population of 1,000 would strike a chord with millions. However, Noah Kahan has proven the opposite. In his three albums to date, he has covered topicssuch as alcoholism, homesickness, and acceptance of personal growth and change. His first album, Busyhead, is a coming-of-age album about growing up with and overcoming anxiety and depression, and finding yourself. I Was / I Am, Kahan’s sophomore record, dives deeper into the more mature and adult forms of the topics he covers on Busyhead, except instead he looks at them from a more accepting lens of personal growth.

For Stick Season, Kahan took a very different approach, exchanging the pop-influenced tones of his earlier works for more earthy, folk themes and sounds, in which pianos and synths are replaced by mandolins and banjos. In writing this record, Kahan moved back to his childhood home of Strafford, VT to fully immerse himself in the rural environment that would shape the sound of this album. Not only that, but moving back homeallowed for a reflective experience influenced by nostalgia and remembering that helped shape Stick Season. The topic of “home” is one of the strong themes on this album, and as someone who has never had a sense of home, I still found solace in this album, which is a testament to the lyrical genius of Noah Kahan.

“Northern Attitude,” the first song on the album, is a check-in song (“How you been? / You settled down?”). It is the perfect way to open an album, especially after the pandemic where many people lost touch with one another due to the lockdown. Not only is it a check-in to everyone else (his audience), but it’s also one for himself. It serves as an individual mental checkpoint where he looks back on the past couple of years and what he has gone through. “Stick Season” is the title track, as well as the most popular song on the album due to it going viral on TikTok. This is a song about falling out of love with someone due to mental health, specifically seasonal depression. Kahan said in an interview with Insider that the phrase “stick season” refers to “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."

Many songs on this album have similar traits and themes, but they all have their own distinct and unique story. “All My Love” is a similar song to “Stick Season” about a particular relationship, but from a different, nostalgic perspective. It’s as if two people are meeting after a long time of not seeing each other and reminiscing about their dynamic in the past. It can also be interpreted as one member of the relationship  remembering the best parts of the relationship while the other has moved on. He is emphasizing that he still cares for them and wants to check in, understands that they are both different people now, but they still have “all my love.” While “All My Love” discusses a relationship that isn’t salvageable, "She Calls Me Back" is a song that seems to be a slight antithesis. It still has the same overarching theme of not feeling worthy of someone, but “She Calls Me Back” is more optimistic, almost as if this scenario is worth saving, whereas the relationships in “All My Love” as well as “Stick Season” are not able to be recovered. This is a song of reliance and needing as well, where the person that he feels needs to save him is not calling him back and he wants them to. He is reflecting on how he can’t let this person go “Does it bite at your edges? / Do you lie awake restless? / Why am I so obsessive? / Hanging onto every sentence / This town's the same as you left it.” This song also highlights his feelings of unworthiness that become more present  in the next song,“Come Over.”

“Come Over” is a song that highlights Kahan’s household life growing up, how ashamed he was of his house, and how he viewed himself and his family as “weird.” He said to Insider that "My dad was a triathlete. He would always be wearing spandex and those funny helmets that go all the way back. 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.'" Kahan highlights this fact when he sings “And my house was designed to kind of look like it’s crying / The eyes are the windows, the garage is the mouth,” and emphasizes his adolescent sheepishness with the line “I know that it ain’t much. I know that it ain’t cool. / Oh, you don’t have to tell the other kids at school.” This song is directly juxtaposed with “Homesick,” although the lyrics tell a different story. In“Homesick,” Kahan describes the town in which he grew up. He highlights the small size of the town with the fact that people there “still don’t know they caught the Boston Bombers.” This is another example of Kahan’s unique talent for using niche ideas to convey a larger message. In the chorus, he shows this twisted sense of homesickness with the poignant line “I would leave if only I could find a reason.”

“New Perspective” is a song that focuses on a particular relationship Kahan had in which the other person changed so much to the point where he couldn’t recognize them. He masterfully details this topic by comparing that person to the neighboring town of Hanover, which had outgrown itself. “Ooh this town’s for the record now / The intersection’s got a Target, and they’re calling it downtown / You and all of your new perspective now / Wish I could shut it in a closet and drag you back down.”  By reflecting on the other person, Noah is also able to reflect on his own progress and changes with his own “new perspective” on life and those around him. This song seems to be a turning point physically and mentally in the album for what follows relating to mental health, healing, and substance abuse. In other words, Kahan focuses on  larger and more influential “adult” issues throughout the second half of thealbum.

“Orange Juice” is a similar song that addresses the rekindling of relationships, much like “All My Love” and “New Perspective.” However, it discusses this topic through the struggles of alcoholism. It tells the story of two people who grew up together and went through a traumatic drunk-driving accident. One of them, the “narrator,” stayed in the town and healed. The other person left the town and fell deeper into alcoholism before finally becoming sober. This song is by far the rawest and most honest song on the album. It allows the listener to look into the narrator’s journey of renewing their relationship with this person with hesitancy, especially with the lyrics “are we all just crows to you now? / are we all just pulling you down,” but also acknowledging that they are not entirely at fault, with the lyrics “You didn’t put those bones in the ground.”

“Everywhere, Everything” is another song about love, but it is the most graphic song lyrically on the album. It is a song that encapsulates staying with someone and holding on to them despite life, and the world, seemingly falling apart around you. This is demonstrated by the line “We didn’t know that the sun was collapsing / ‘Til the seas rose and the buildings came crashing.” Kahan emphatically sings in the chorus that he wants to love this person until they’re “food for the worms to eat / ‘til our fingers decompose / Keep my hand in yours.” This song is one of the best displays of Kahan’s supreme ability to write about his own experiences in unique ways without losing the relatability of the lyrics themselves. They are brutally honest, yet beautifully crafted and it makes one wonder how this style of writing hasn’t become more popular, as it perfectly encapsulates the feeling of true love in the darkest of times.

“Growing Sideways” is a beautiful song that is practically a therapy session lyrically and musically. Kahan wrote about seeing everyone around him growing and developing and moving forward in their lives, while he is simply stagnant and coping. He is, quite literally, “growing sideways.” The song begins with him sitting on “a sad-eyed middle-aged man’s new leather couch,” signifying his therapist. He knows that he wants to change, and that he can, but he feels paralyzed in the moment, unable to move forward.

The final song on the album, “The View Between Villages,” is a very dynamic song that starts slow and melancholy, and then crescendos to a climax, with powerful lyrics to accompany this melodic journey. It is a song about reflection and growth, with the “villages” that he is between serving as metaphors for events or eras in life. Kahan is in between pain and healing, and is trying to not fall back into sorrowful memories from his past, such as the “death of my dog, the stretch of my skin.” As all this “washes over [him],” he’s “angry again.” This is the perfect song to end the album with because it sums up many of the themes that Kahan has been highlighting throughout the album.

While the topic of juxtaposition between nostalgia for home and wanting to leave home is the main theme of this album, one of the other important themes that is more underlying and unsaid is the topic of mental health. It coincides with every motif on this album, and every struggle that Kahan highlights is rooted in his battle with mental health issues. From retrospectively analyzing past failed relationships, to the aforementioned conflict of sense of home, to simply the way the weather affects one’s mood in the winter, mental health is always the common thread. All of Kahan’s deepest fears and rawest emotions are connected to the things that go on in his head, and they are externalized in every lyric.

With Kahan spotlighting mental health as much as he does, it’s not a surprise that he is gaining quite the following, particularly with young adults and college students. College years are some of the most stressful years in a person’s life. During these four or more years, one must decide what they want to do with what seems like the rest of their lives before they jump into the void of uncertainty that is life after college. This fact alone takes its toll. In a study by the Newport Institute, researchers found in 2021 that about 60% of college students suffer from depression, which is a 50% increase from ten years ago. Despite this massive number, students still feel incredibly isolated in their feelings and experiences. This is where Noah Kahan’s music particularly shines through.

Kahan’s lyrics offer a beacon of light to those who feel as though no one else shares their feelings. And to these students who are far from home and the people they called their own, Stick Season proves that they are not alone, that they are heard, and they are seen. From the hometown-nostalgia songs of “Homesick” and “Come Over,” to the therapy-style “Growing Sideways,” Kahan has connected college students across the country.

Works Cited

Ahlgrim, Callie. “Noah Kahan Took the Time of Year 'No One Really Likes' and Made It into 'Stick Season,' an Album Anyone Could Love.” Insider, 13 Oct. 2022, https://www.insider.com/noah-kahan-stick-season-interview-2022-10.

Mosk, Mitch. Review of A Beautiful Inner Reckoning: Noah Kahan's Stirring 'I Was/I Am' Plunges Into The Deepest Sense of Self, Review of Noah Kahan: I Was/I Am Atwood Magazine, 17 Sept. 2021, https://atwoodmagazine.com/iwia-noah-kahan-i-was-i-am-album-review-music-feature/ Accessed 18 Apr. 2023.

Mosk, Mitch. Review of Our Take: Noah Kahan's 'Busyhead' Is a Powerfully Moving Debut Album, Review of Noah Kahan: 'Busyhead' Atwood Magazine, 14 June 2019, https://atwoodmagazine.com/busyhead-noah-kahan-album-review-interview/ Accessed 18 Apr. 2023.

Muller | 10/17/22 2:00am, Elle. “Review: Noah Kahan's 'Stick Season' Beautifully Captures the Complexities of Homesickness.” The Dartmouth, 17 Oct. 2022, https://www.thedartmouth.com/article/2022/10/stick-season-review.

Newport Institute. 2022, NewPort Institute, https://www.newportinstitute.com/resources/mental-health/depression-on-college-campuses/. Accessed 18 Apr. 2023.

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