“It’s about the drive between South Strafford and Strafford,” Kahan shares. It’s a dichotomy best illustrated on the closing track of Stick Season, “The View Between Villages” – an ethereal account of the canyon of emotions one feels when passing through a place they love and hate at the same time. What’s important to him now is keeping his past just enough in view to honor New England and the stories he worked so hard to tell on Stick Season – but not so much as to get trapped again in what could or should have been – while simultaneously looking at the future as a thing of opportunity, not an impossible to-do list of self-imposed expectations. “That’s really hard, to be bound by this pain and not even have it be something that brings you closer.” “It touches on what it’s like to go through something really traumatic with somebody and to have something that should bring you closer, but instead it pulls you farther away,” he says. He says, though, that he wrote it about a collection of stories shared between friends and family rather than just one person. One of the album’s biggest standouts is a rainy narrative piece called “Orange Juice,” which lays out Kahan’s relationship to someone suffering with alcoholism and addiction. “It’s dope, I go to that Target all the time ,” he laughs. In real life, though, he says the town actually didn’t have a Target – until one was coincidentally built shortly after he wrote the song. Not every detail on the set is purely autobiographical on “New Perspectives,” for example, Kahan backdrops his feelings of resentment with a town full of “liberal rednecks,” where the addition of a Target store is enough to send shockwaves through the community. In one of Stick Season’s gloomiest tracks, “Come Over,” he references the late 2000s stock market crash – “I love that I’m able to reference Dow Jones in a song, I think that’s funny,” he chuckles – and on “Homesick,” one of the songs he says he’s most proud of, he makes mention of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombers (“I’m tired of dirt roads named after high school friends’ grandfathers/ And motherf–kers here still don’t know they caught the Boston bombers”). ![]() Inspired by songwriting favorites like Phoebe Bridgers and Sam Fender, Kahan ignored his pop tendency to make songs as relatable as possible, and instead started planting unprecedented detail into his lyrics. “ is definitely a continuation – I don’t know how much of it is the same characters or the same relationship that Cape Elizabeth was built off of, but it’s definitely the same universe.” ![]() “It’s a story about one person being here and another person being there,” he says of the project. In 2020, he wrote and released the EP Cape Elizabeth, five songs of bittersweet testimony from a love that started and ended in coastal Maine. He discovered a new strain of loneliness in being cut off from seeing his fans in person, and again when he stayed back as his friends and family began returning to their normal lives after the worst of the pandemic had passed.īut somewhere between snow-capped mountain ranges and forests of birch and maple trees, Kahan finally found enough distance from the music industry – and closeness to himself – to start taking his folk inclinations seriously. He spent the pandemic in his hometown of Strafford, Vermont, meaning he literally couldn’t look away from the sore memories frozen in time by his surroundings. That’s not to say the period was easy for him, though. 10 on Billboard’s Adult Alternative Airplay chart and has logged 41.4 million U.S. Released in July after Kahan first tested pieces of it out on social media, the album’s lead single and title track, “Stick Season,” has reached No. ![]() Though he’s loved the genre for years, he never dared embrace it out of concern that it would ice out listeners who enjoyed the universally accessible pop stylings of his more well-known tracks – like “Hurt Somebody,” a 2017 collaboration with Julia Michaels, which has amassed 114.5 million on-demand official U.S. The new record finds Kahan doing two things he previously would’ve thought too risky: singing lyrics saturated with details he once would’ve avoided altogether, and swerving full throttle into folk music, which he’d only ever flirted with in the past. That said, Stick Season is by and large the most honest he’s ever been on a project, something that may come as a surprise to those familiar with the emotional intimacy of his first two albums, 2019’s Busyhead and 2021’s I Was / I Am. Kahan has become one of the most recognizable forces in acoustic indie-pop over the past five years, thanks to his alpine voice and sucker-punch-to-the-heart lyrical style. Too Many Songs, Not Enough Hits: Pop Music Is Struggling to Create New Stars
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