NOAH KAHAN - "Stick Season"

This is the first of a series of Patreon-exclusive posts which are notes on current No.1s, intended to go up while they're actually at No.1. They won't show up on FT and I'm not prejudging myself by giving them marks or anything! Also, I apologise for the last 6 weeks' lack of content - I was ill for most of December and early January and not really able to do much, least of all write. Fingers crossed I'll get back to regular posting soon.

I decided to start writing about contemporary hits to give patrons some properly “exclusive content”, but also because I thought getting a ‘first draft of history’ down might encourage me to think more about current trends and contexts. And then of course the first Number 1 of the year is something I mostly just boggle at.

“Stick Season” has been knocking around for months - it’s reaching the top now as a kind of buggins’ turn or long-service medal, though this honour hasn’t (sadly!) been granted to the much better “Prada”, which still sits in the Top 5 as a reproachful reminder to everyone streaming this gawky thing.

But what is it? “Stick Season” is sort of folk-rock, sort of country-rock, kind of bluegrass-adjacent, not really like much of anything the British record-streaming public otherwise seem to go for. Of course it’s a TikTok thing, but it’s been hanging around now for long enough that it can’t just be a TikTok thing, it’s crossing over on some level.

The strong but not entirely specific sense of place it has doesn’t hurt, I’m sure - I’ve never been to Vermont, but the record, while explicitly about the state, is evocative of a general American semi-wilderness which I (and lots of other Brits) have seen on TV. America has its hot bits and its cold bits and this is a song about the cold bits. “Stick season” is a great phrase, even if you don’t know that it’s an actual bit of local slang - a bare time, when you’re down to your self and your wits and the things you can gather.

The song’s full of other little hooks which hint at bigger stories, family troubles, sketched-in as cleverly as the “COVID on the planes” line is clunky. Maybe if you’re a Noah Kahan fan you get to hear those stories, maybe not, but they establish him as an emotional hard-luck story quickly and mean “Stick Season” can do its job.

Elsewhere things are a little more uneven. The two-part chorus, half about his mom, half about his ex, works pretty well, the hip-hop style enjambements (“exist-ed”) are hooky as hell first couple of times you hear them but have the potential - already being realised in my case - to get tired fast.

It’s striking and catchy but a little bit hollow. It sounds vaguely generic - like a bit of folky music someone’s written as a background insert for a movie scene, like it’s gesturing at a world of music, acting as a stand-in for it. Which is probably what helps it do well. I could be wrong, we could be at the beginning of the reign of Noah Kahan as a chart force, and as a song about one’s relationship troubles this isn’t a universe away from stuff which UK listeners love (like Ed or Taylor - “Stick Season” is one of many shots at answering the question “what does a male pop hit sound like in a Taylor Swift world?”). But I think that most of the people hearing “Stick Season” don’t want to hear a lot of records like it. They are happy for this to be the sole representative of a particular vibe in their 2023-2024, and the fact that it hits that vibe rather than cohering into anything more solid is a feature.

Stick Man characters are (c) Julia Donaldson and Axel Schleffer