Contents
- Introduction
- The Story Behind "Stick Season"
- Lyrical Analysis: A Folk Tale of Longing and Place
- What Fans and Critics Think It Means
- Personal Anecdote: The First Time I Heard "Stick Season"
- How "Stick Season" Inspired My Song: "Something About Her"
- Songs That Resonate in a Similar Way
- Final Thoughts
Some songs hit you like a snowstorm—quiet but all-consuming. Stick Season by Noah Kahan was that kind of song for me. It’s the type of track that doesn’t just get stuck in your head, it moves into your chest, unpacks its bags, and stays a while.
A few lines in, I was frozen. I didn’t know folk-pop could sound this raw. I didn’t know a song could name feelings I hadn’t even admitted to myself. But Stick Season did. In this post, I want to dive into the Stick Season lyrics meaning, explore the song’s themes, share how others interpret it, and reflect on how it reshaped the way I write—especially in my own track, Something About Her.
The Story Behind "Stick Season"
“Stick season” is a uniquely New England term—used in places like Vermont to describe the drab in-between time after the leaves fall but before the snow comes. Noah Kahan, who hails from Vermont, explained in Holler Country that the phrase became a metaphor for the emotional limbo he was stuck in.
"It’s a time when everything is kind of dead. It felt like a perfect analogy for how I was feeling inside."
During the pandemic, Kahan turned inward, abandoning polished pop for rawer, stripped-back folk. He leaned on acoustic guitar, storytelling, and local imagery, reminiscent of Springsteen or Paul Simon. The Stick Season song meaning evolved from this tension—between where you come from and where you’re trying to go, between who you were and who you’re becoming.
Lyrical Analysis: A Folk Tale of Longing and Place
The opening lines set the tone with brutal emotional precision:
"As you promised me that I was more than all the miles combined / You must have had yourself a change of heart like halfway through the drive..."
Here, physical distance becomes emotional distance. A breakup is rendered in a single moment: a car speeding past an exit sign. That’s all it takes.
"And I love Vermont, but it's the season of the sticks / And I saw your mom, she forgot that I existed"
These lines ache. There’s something uniquely devastating about being erased not just by the person you loved, but by their world too. Vermont—his home—isn’t comforting anymore. It’s a backdrop to emotional barrenness. That’s the Stick Season lyrics meaning in a nutshell: a love lost, not just from a person but from a whole sense of place.
"So I thought that if I piled something good on all my bad / That I could cancel out the darkness I inherited from dad"
This is where Noah’s vulnerability becomes generational. He’s not just singing about a breakup—he’s singing about inherited trauma, emotional habits passed down like heirlooms. It reminds me of Exodus 20:5, where God talks about the consequences of sin echoing through generations. But Kahan isn’t blaming—he’s wrestling.
"I am no longer funny, 'cause I miss the way you laugh"
That lyric floored me. So often we try to be enough—funny enough, good enough—to keep someone’s love. When they leave, it feels like we lose the parts of ourselves they made come alive. That’s a profound grief.
"I'll dream each night of some version of you / That I might not have, but I did not lose"
How do you grieve someone who’s still alive but unreachable? That tension—loss without death—is exactly what makes Stick Season so haunting. It echoes 1 Thessalonians 4:13: "Do not grieve like the rest of mankind, who have no hope." There’s sorrow, but also a flicker of hope. Even if just in dreams.
Check Out My Top 10 Songs Similar to 'Stick Season'
What Fans and Critics Think It Means
Across Reddit and music blogs, listeners have poured out interpretations of the Stick Season song meaning. Some see it as a breakup anthem. Others call it a tribute to New England melancholia. Some say it’s a meditation on seasonal depression, particularly in the North.
On American Songwriter, Kahan says:
“It’s about isolation, the feeling of being forgotten, of watching someone move on. It’s very specific to me, but people tell me it feels like their story too.”
WBRU called it “an anthem of modern loneliness,” resonating deeply with people who have moved away from home or lost parts of themselves along the way.
In that sense, the Stick Season lyrics meaning is flexible. It’s a mirror, showing you your own version of absence.
Personal Anecdote: The First Time I Heard "Stick Season"
I first heard it walking alone through a London park just after moving from New Zealand. The air was cold, the trees bare. It felt like my own stick season—between one life and the next, homesick and heart-tired.
As Kahan’s voice cracked over "Now you’re tire tracks and one pair of shoes", I stopped walking. It felt like he’d reached into my ribcage and said, “Yeah, I know this ache too.”
That was the moment I started rethinking how I wrote songs. I didn’t want to just tell stories anymore. I wanted to feel them in real time, to write like a journal entry whispered into a microphone.
How "Stick Season" Inspired My Song: "Something About Her"
I wrote Something About Her after that winter. It’s different in tone—warmer, more hopeful—but the DNA is the same. Like Stick Season, it’s about a moment that holds a world. Mine just happened under moonlight, not grey skies.
"I see this girl, she shines tonight / I watch her sing and dance in the moonlight..."
This was my version of Kahan’s exit sign moment. A glance that changed me.
"I don’t know what it is about you / It’s something about you..."
Where Noah leans into confusion and pain, I leaned into awe and connection. But both songs share a reverence for the intangible—the feeling you can’t name but know by heart.
Listening to Stick Season gave me permission to be simpler, more honest. To write like I’m talking to the person, not writing about them. I stopped chasing cleverness and started chasing truth.
Songs That Resonate in a Similar Way
If you connected with the Stick Season lyrics meaning, here are a few songs that echo its emotional terrain:
- "Cherry Wine" – Hozier: quiet, raw, intimate grief.
- "Motion Sickness" – Phoebe Bridgers: poetic storytelling with a knife edge.
- "Go Easy, Kid" – Monica Martin: gentle encouragement from within pain.
- "Only Love" – Ben Howard: spiritual ache and wonder.
- "The Night We Met" – Lord Huron: memory as a haunting.
- "You Were Mine" – Dixie Chicks: longing for a different ending.
Final Thoughts
Stick Season isn’t just a song. It’s a season of the soul—barren, honest, suspended in transition. And yet, there’s something sacred in that space. Scripture reminds us: "He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds" (Psalm 147:3).
This song helped me find new language for grief and new freedom in songwriting. It showed me that the most personal art often becomes the most universal.
So here’s my invitation to you: What’s your version of stick season? And what version of you might still be waiting at that exit sign?
