Noah Kahan goes all in on Vermont for new album 'Stick Season'
Correction: A previous version of this article misidentified Zack Bryan, whose music was among the inspirations for Kahan's new album.
Noah Kahan was stuck.
He had established his career as a pop musician, but he wasn’t enjoying it. He spent his time writing songs and going into the studio to make pop music he thought would make his record label happy, but it was starting to feel like a chore, like work.
To get unstuck, he thought of sticks – specifically stick season, that drab time of year in late fall in Vermont where the colorful leaves have fallen from the trees but the white snow has yet to fall from the sky.
The musician who grew up in Strafford wrote a song more in the folk vein he prefers and with lyrics drawing upon the life he knew growing up in New England. He called the song “Stick Season.” The lyrics use that time of year as a metaphor for relationships, where the ending can be ugly but heralds a fresh beginning.
Kahan posted “Stick Season” to the video site TikTok where, as he put it, the song went “semi-viral.” The 25-year-old musician was no longer stuck.
“It was a real moment of gratification that I can do what I want to do,” Kahan said of the success of the song. He said he had been “super-scared” of changing his sound, but now that he had begun that change he saw a path forward.
“Having that affirmation,” he said, “was life-changing for me.”
Kahan’s third full-length album comes out Friday, Oct. 14, via Republic Records. It’s called, naturally, “Stick Season,” and was recorded largely at Guilford Sound in southern Vermont. The 14 tracks recast his career in that folk-leaning storytelling direction he sought but was afraid to go after.
“I always felt like what I needed to do was what was expected,” Kahan said. “I wasn’t making clear enough that this was what I wanted.”
Selling out Higher Ground
Kahan spoke Tuesday with the Burlington Free Press via video conferencing from Nashville, where he and his band were rehearsing for the “Stick Season” tour that started Wednesday in Charleston, South Carolina. The tour will bring Kahan to Higher Ground in South Burlington for four shows in late October that sold out weeks ago.
“I couldn’t believe how fast they sold out,” said Kahan, who played three sold-out shows in Higher Ground’s Ballroom a year earlier. “The response has been crazy in Vermont.”
Previously:Vermont musician Noah Kahan ready to play sold-out shows this weekend at Higher Ground
It’s not just Vermont. Kahan’s entire fall tour – 27 dates and 40,000 tickets – has sold out as well. Fans appear to be responding to Kahan’s change of direction that they’ll hear in full on the new album.
He grew up in Vermont and New Hampshire, spending what he considers his formative years on the Vermont side in Strafford. He loves his home region now. That wasn’t always the case when he was living in small-town Orange County.
“Growing up I was really bored. I was bored in school, I was bored on the weekends,” he said. “I experienced a lot of the boredom and the beauty and the sense of community.”
Much of the new album captures a warm if melancholy sense of New England. One of the few that takes a harsher approach is called “Homesick,” which reflects a touch of nostalgia for one’s roots but more deeply captures a sense of being sick of the place one calls home. (“Well I’m tired of dirt roads/Named after high school friends’ grandfathers”).
“I definitely wanted that term to be that play of words to tell that story,” Kahan said of the song that reflects how badly he wanted to leave his home area and then once he did, how badly he wanted to return.
“It’s definitely the most-ambivalent portrait on the record about growing up in a small town,” he said. “It’s my duty to be completely honest about what it’s like.”
The meaning of ‘Stick Season’
Kahan, who had been living in Brooklyn, returned to Vermont as the COVID-19 pandemic broke out in the spring of 2020. He was tired of the drudgery of writing pop songs and just wanted to be back home with friends and family. (He now lives with his girlfriend in Watertown, Massachusetts.)
He released an EP that year, “Cape Elizabeth,” that he recorded in Thetford. That more-pared-down sound resonated with fans on tour the following year and boosted his confidence to pursue the direction he followed for “Stick Season.”
When the song “Stick Season” came out, he worried that its specificity of place wouldn’t resonate with listeners outside of Vermont. The song has lyrics such as “And I love Vermont but it's the season of the sticks/And I saw your mom she forgot that I existed” that even manages mid-line poetry with the off-rhyme of “Vermont” and “your mom.”
As he wrote the song, though, Kahan kept the universality of the words in mind. “Stick Season” isn’t about Vermont, it’s about loneliness and isolation that just happens to take place in Vermont. It can be horrible to be alone, Kahan said, adding that the most-alone he’s felt was when he lived in New York City. Having people embrace a song about loneliness, he said, made him feel less alone.
Influence of Paul Simon, Counting Crows
Kahan wrote much of the material at the Strafford home of his mother, Lauri Berkenkamp. The bulk of the publicity photos taken for “Stick Season” show Kahan on those grounds, often with his 2-year-old German shepherd, Penny, or his mother’s German shepherd, Oma. He said his pattern for writing the songs for “Stick Season” was to get up in the morning, drive to his mother’s house, write some songs, take a break by tossing the ball to his dog, then return to songwriting.
Some of his vocal and songwriting influences come through clearly on “Stick Season,” specifically Paul Simon and Adam Duritz of Counting Crows. Kahan said Gregory Alan Isakov and British singer-songwriter Sam Fender were big influences, too, because of their ability to bring a listener to their sense of place.
“I wanted to kind of world-build for this album,” he said. Kahan also tapped into the “chanty choruses and emotional guitars” of The Lumineers and Mumford & Sons, as well as the storytelling ability of singer-songwriter Zack Bryan.
Kahan said he’s always enjoyed short stories, and his favorite novel is John Steinbeck’s “East of Eden” with its strong sense of place set in the Salinas Valley of California. Another big influences is his mother; Berkenkamp is a successful writer of books for children who urged her son on during the writing process for “Stick Season.”
Sometimes, he said, he’d get overwhelmed by the writing process, and his mother would sit him down and say don’t write a song, just write what comes into your head, and when you’re done with that do it three more times. Kahan said he found himself writing “blah blah blah,” but those seemingly insignificant strings were eventually sewn into feelings that took shape in full songs.
“My mom is the biggest influence in the world on me. She has always believed in me. She has just incredible taste and she has an amazing ear,” Kahan said. “When she would like something, I knew it was good.”
If you go
WHAT: Noah Kahan with Adam Melchor
WHEN: 8 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 27-Sunday, Oct. 30
WHERE: Higher Ground Ballroom, South Burlington
INFORMATION: Sold out. www.highergroundmusic.com
Contact Brent Hallenbeck at [email protected]. Follow Brent on Twitter at www.twitter.com/BrentHallenbeck.
This article originally appeared on Burlington Free Press: How Vermont influenced Noah Kahan’s new album 'Stick Season'
