Stick Season

Stick Season: How Noah Kahan Turned a Vermont Winter Into a Global Anthem

Picture the northeastern United States in late autumn, when the maples have shed their leaves but the snow hasn't arrived yet. Local Vermonters call it stick season: bare branches, iron-grey skies, mud on every back road, and a particular brand of restlessness that settles over small towns like fog. Noah Kahan, who grew up in Strafford, Vermont, understood that feeling in his bones long before he ever put it to tape.

A Songwriter Shaped by Small-Town Geography

Kahan had been building a devoted following since his debut in the late 2010s, releasing albums that wore his folk and indie-rock influences openly. His voice carried the weight of someone who loved his hometown and simultaneously needed to escape it. By 2022, when Stick Season (the album) arrived, he had sharpened that tension into some of the most emotionally precise songwriting of his generation. The title track distilled everything: the specific loneliness of being rooted somewhere while watching others leave, or being the one who left while others stayed behind.

A Slow Burn Up the Charts

The song's commercial life unfolded at its own pace, as if it were mimicking its subject matter. It entered the Billboard Hot 100 on October 14, 2023, debuting at number 80, a modest start for a track that had already been circulating among folk and indie audiences for over a year. What followed was a textbook slow climb fueled by word-of-mouth sharing, streaming, and a community of listeners who felt personally seen by the lyrics. By late April 2024, the song peaked at number 9 and spent an extraordinary 52 weeks on the Hot 100, one of the longer chart runs of that era. A track about going nowhere, in terms of geography, went just about everywhere.

The Sound That Made It Stick

The production sits in that space between folk intimacy and arena ambition: acoustic guitar that grounds the emotion, electric textures that lift it skyward when the chorus arrives. Kahan's vocal delivery carries the kind of controlled anguish that suggests he has sat with these feelings long enough to understand them fully rather than just shout them out. There is a precision to the arrangement that keeps the song from tipping into self-pity; instead it achieves something more interesting, a kind of rueful clarity about place and belonging that listeners across very different geographies found unexpectedly universal.

Why Vermont Became Everywhere

The cultural reach of Stick Season exceeded anything that its modest regional specificity might have predicted. TikTok had a measurable hand in its spread, as users across the country set their own autumn footage to the track and found that Kahan's imagery translated perfectly to Ohio cornfields, Pacific Northwest forests, and Louisiana bayous shedding their summer color. The phrase "stick season" entered the vocabularies of people who had never set foot in New England. The song accumulated over 55 million YouTube views, with momentum that kept building long after its chart debut.

A New Voice Staking Its Claim

For Kahan, the song's crossover success confirmed what his core audience had long argued: that emotionally honest, geographically specific folk-pop could find a mass audience in the streaming era without diluting its character. He performed at festivals and venues that would have seemed distant ambitions just a few years prior, and the broader music industry began to see him as one of the more substantial songwriting talents to emerge from the 2020s. Stick Season (the album) earned him Grammy attention, and the title track became the emblem of a career entering its next, more visible chapter. He subsequently became one of the more compelling live performers of his generation, packing rooms with audiences who knew every word and sang back with the conviction of people who genuinely needed the song. That relationship between artist and listener, built slowly over years of streaming and late-night listening sessions, is the kind of success that does not arrive through marketing machinery. It arrives through the rare alignment of the right song and the right moment in the right lives.

Press play and let the grey November light in. You might not be from Vermont, but you will recognize every mile of this road.

“Stick Season” — Noah Kahan's singular moment on the 2020s charts.