Stick Seasons
(TW for violence, below the paywall).
In 2021, before Noah Kahan got really big, before his shows cost more than a middle-class high school kid could afford to splurge on, the younger child bought tickets to see him in Northampton, Massachusetts, at a small venue, Pearl Street, where I’d seen shows and gone dancing when I was a student at Smith.
We drove down from Maine with a friend she’d known all her life and stayed with my mother in one of the hill towns across the valley, in a drafty old farmhouse that has been in my father’s family for over a century now.
Alas: I got an email the morning of the concert that Noah was sick and couldn’t sing. Oh well. They would reschedule, they said, and they did, but it would be a while. We made the best of it, exploring Northampton, going to Thorne’s Market, eating ice cream at Herrell’s. The girls got their palms read.
It took more than a year, but the concert was indeed rescheduled: in the meantime, though, Noah had blown up (the original concert date was right before Stick Season was released) and they moved venues, to an old movie theater in town. It was still a lot smaller than the shows he was selling out on this new tour, but it wasn’t Pearl Street. She’d paid something like $18 or $24 for tickets at a venue where he would have barely needed a microphone.
We headed down, with a different friend this time because the original friend was away at college. We couldn’t stay at my mother’s, because…well…it’s a long story, for a different time. But we couldn’t. A hotel seemed unnecessarily expensive and I sometimes have this idea that I can do anything, just give me enough coffee, it’s just driving, straight shot yeah just 95, no problem (this attitude is probably, after 30+ years in New England, the most New England thing about me).
So that’s how we ended up driving down to Western Mass from Central Maine one very late fall afternoon and back again through the night, about 5 hours each way. We dropped the friend off in the parking lot of the Whitten Road Hannaford in Augusta at 4 a.m., where her boyfriend was waiting for her, and continued on home, another 20 minutes. It was worth it, just for the looks of delight on their faces when the first chords of “Stick Season” hit at the end of the set and they were screaming the lyrics along with the rest of the crowd when Noah held the mic out.
I can’t help but be both amused and a little annoyed, as a born and raised Alaskan, when New Englanders think they have the corner on dark and twisty, when they think their winters are long, when they think they are the crabby, crazy ones. My children are from Maine, but they’re also from where I’m from, because I raised them, and it couldn’t have been easy to have me, someone as intimately familiar with the dark by way of simple geography (the edge of the Arctic Circle), as their mother. (They are also proud “Massholes”; their father grew up in Wellesley).
Noah gets a pass because he’s normalized talking about mental health issues and also because he’s funny as hell (“I’m mean because I grew up in New England” from his song “Homesick” could very easily be “I’m mean because I grew up in Alaska” except that it’s not that funny – some of us have some serious-as-fuck mean streaks).
