![]() “For me, music has always been about bridge building,” Oladokun told AP.The song also topped the Billboard Album Rock Tracks chart for 10 weeks and the Modern Rock Tracks chart for nine weeks….Lightning Crashes. Her latest album, “Proof of Life,” features a collaboration with Kahan, the dark-but-also-kind-of-funny “We’re All Gonna Die.” Joy Oladokun, Kahan’s tour opener, acknowledged her own mental health struggles during her set. Launched last month, the project named for his 2019 album has already raised over $340,000, with Kahan donating a portion of his tour ticket sales. That’s part of why it felt like a natural step for him to launch The Busyhead Project, an initiative aiming to raise $1 million for organizations that specialize in mental health resources and awareness. “But for me the question is always can this help somebody get through their own discomfort … or problem or struggle?” Sometimes it takes me sitting down and writing a song to remember that I was feeling that way,” Kahan told the AP. Sometimes I’m not great at processing them in a very logical way. “Songwriting for me has always been a way to process my emotions. He sang his lyrics, with their open references to depression, medication and therapy, and invited the audience to scream his words back to him.ĭressed in deep greens, browns, plaid and blue denim overalls, the crowd obliged, rendering the atmosphere at Radio City one you’d find at summer camp - and not just because the show fell on a day when the air outside smelled of bonfire smoke. That meant introducing some acceptance and grace, to counter some of the resentment he said imbued the original release: “In a lot of ways I wrote this record as a letter to myself to say it’s okay to feel these things and it’s okay to go on this journey.”Īt a sold-out concert at New York’s Radio City Music Hall two days before the deluxe album’s release, Kahan encouraged “even the happiest person in the room” to be in therapy. “I wanted to kind of show people who I was and continue to do that in the context of ‘Stick Season,’ but also explain this journey I’ve been on in the past year, with touring all the time and trying to be creative and feeling like I was a fraud,” Kahan, who has long been open about his mental health, said as he described the motivation behind the deluxe album. But watching it explode in the months that followed was challenging emotionally and creatively. Making the album about home, he said, felt like home. Kahan’s narrators aren’t perfect, but that’s the point. But the topics he dissects are heavy - along with heartbreak, isolation and homesickness, there are references to substance abuse, death, depression and divorce. Moments of humor throughout the album reflect Kahan’s personality. “Being able to finally explore that in this record and really lean into those inspirations and those feelings was really freeing.” “When I would write songs that were more pop-y in a studio, I would go home and write a song that was more folk-y just for me because I felt like I was accessing that inner child,” Kahan said of previous projects. Seeing fans connect with the song’s lyrics and themes has been “the coolest thing,” Kahan said, especially because “Stick Season” also marked his wholehearted embrace of the folk genre and childhood influences like The Avett Brothers and Paul Simon. When the single came out last July, Kahan called it “his favorite song ever” in a tweet. But it was one with momentum: Fans had latched onto the song long before its release, having heard Kahan perform it on pandemic-era Instagram livestreams and at shows that followed. It wasn’t his first big release - at 26, Kahan has already put out three studio albums and two EPs. “Stick Season,” the song, went viral last year, earning millions of streams fueled largely by social media. “And the truth is it’s always somewhere in the middle when you really go back.” “I’m speaking about the highs and the lows,” Kahan said of reconciling the version of home he’d written about with reality. Kahan revisits those themes through a new lens on the recently released “Stick Season (We’ll All Be Here Forever),” a deluxe version of the album that adds six new tracks and an extended version of fan-favorite “The View Between Villages.” The additions also see Kahan reflect on the eight months between the original album’s release and now. Writing the folk-pop album, he told The Associated Press, felt “like breathing.” Or, in the case of the album’s title track, when fall hasn’t yet turned to winter. When homesickness clashes with a desire to leave. When a broken friendship is just beginning to mend. When resentment lingers but forgiveness feels possible. ![]() NEW YORK (AP) - Singer-songwriter Noah Kahan’s “Stick Season” is about New England - a topic the Vermont native says he could write about for the rest of his life - but it’s also largely about in-between spaces.
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