This is Not a Review

On Kahan, Fender, Springsteen, and writing

In 2022-23, somebody from Vermont telling you to listen to Noah Kahan was kind of like somebody from Jersey telling you to listen to Springsteen in, say, 1975. I consider it a blessing, a mitzvah, and a damn good thing that my friend from Vermont made this particular daughter of New Jersey start listening to Noah Kahan.

I do have historical rationale for this comparison, I promise, but first: I am no music expert. Occasionally, I’ve written articles or essays inspired by music, like “Thanks for Nothing” in 2020, or recommendations and interviews in a free Boston-area paper in the earliest 2000s. But I’m not a proper critic. I have neither the voluminous knowledge nor the technical vocabulary required of a great pontificator on songs from any genre.

I just like what I like when I like it, and sometimes it makes me want to create.

Back to Noah Kahan and Bruuuuuuuuce (official State of New Jersey-sanctioned pronunciation). Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band released their first two albums in 1973. Greetings from Asbury Park and the Wild, The Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle are both wonderful, as are Kahan’s 2019 debut Busyhead, his 2020 EP Cape Elizabeth, and his 2021 album I Was/I Am. All made good impressions on critics and on a rabid homegrown fanbase in the lads’ respective states of origin.

But the third time was indeed a charm for Springsteen, who really broke big with 1975’s Born to Run. And it was Kahan’s third album, 2022’s Stick Season, that led to his induction into the hallucinatory level of fame and access that brings one a Saturday Night Live musical guest spot and duets with stars like Post Malone, Hozier and Kasey Musgraves.

In 2023, he released an expanded version of his debut album, Stick Season: We’ll All Be Here Forever, containing seven additional tracks and some of the aforementioned duets. He continues to release new versions of those tracks as singles, and he’s announced that he’s nearly done with that project.

Both Springsteen and Kahan were 25 when their third albums were released. This has no real relevance except that I was pleased by the symmetry when I did the math. Kahan turned 25 on Jan. 1, 2022, and Stick Season was released that October. Born to Run came out in August of 1975, the month before Springsteen turned 26.

I can’t imagine achieving that level of mainstream success the very same year I was finally allowed to rent a car without paying an extra fee, but I assume I would’ve partied myself into a hole in the ground, six feet deep.

Thankfully, Kahan and Springsteen did not. They have, in their respective ways, written and spoken about mental illness, including addiction, but at press time they remain on this planet with the rest of us. I hope this trend continues for quite a long while, particularly for Kahan, though I have yet to grapple with the reality of 74-year-old Bruce Springsteen’s mortality. I’ll cross that Boardwalk when I come to it.

As he nears the conclusion of his Stick Season era, including a pile of the aforementioned duets, Kahan has demonstrated a canny ability to partner with exactly the right star for each song. “Homesick” was already great, but Kahan’s addition of the gloriously Springsteenian Sam Fender (who also sounds like he was hatched from whatever spaceship gave us Jeff Buckley, yet somehow is entirely his own original person from North East England) deepens the song’s emotional impact.

Fender’s 2018 EP Dead Boys, 2019 album Hypersonic Missiles, and 2021 album Seventeen Going Under are also fantastic. He’s been big in the UK for a minute now, and I expect his own future third studio album will do for him in the States what Born to Run did for Springsteen and Stick Season is doing for Kahan.

Kahan, Springsteen and Fender share a strong sense of place. Vermont, New Jersey and North Shields (Fender’s hometown near Newcastle) permeate the lyrics and thus the music. I live in Chicago right now, at my 29th or 30th address in all my nomadic years, and I am writing about New Jersey.

I am trying, in my own unmelodic way, to write about the landscape in which I was born, through mythology and lived experience and recorded history and fantasy. As I sit down to plunge forth with my next novel, the first one I’ve written without the weighted blanket of a signed contract or the numbing medicine of bourbon, I think as much about its New Jersey setting as I do my incredible fear of not ever getting this fucker out of me.

I tried to make it an hourlong pilot, which in my experience is easier and faster than a 60,000+ word book, but to no avail. It wants to be a book, so a book it shall be, if I can stick with it.

No matter how romantic any author gets about this process, writing a book is something like being constipated and taking a giant bloody shit, followed by exhaustion and emotional (and sometimes literal) hemorrhoids.

It’s stuck inside you and you’ve got to expel it, and the only way to do it is all this fucking typing. It’s not an athletic pursuit, but it is a physical one, requiring loads of unnatural hours sitting or standing at a desk, staring at a screen that does nothing good for one’s eyesight.

Once in awhile, the process is quite fun, even simple. You sit down, the words pour out, you smile and get up and go do something else until the next day’s writing session. But I can’t say it’s ever easy, exactly.

The good thing is that, with a bit of luck and talent and dedication, what you’re left with is not an actual pile of excrement, but something good, something that others actually want to experience for themselves. I am not a musician, but I imagine finishing an album is something like that, too.

For the second time, I bought a typing thing that does not have a blue light screen, and am hoping this overpriced word processor allows me to remain at the same contacts prescription I’ve been re-ordering for five years. I don’t know how much I’ll use it, but I’ll give it a try. I’m trying a lot of new things these days.

I’m trying to learn to be in my body and to hold my body differently so that I can sustain these marathon writing sessions - and a busy full-time job - without collapsing into a crumpled-up heap of pain. I do a little daily yoga, and apply CBD cream, and spend an odd amount of time stretched out on my back atop a gigantic cushion that allows me to hold a bridge pose. I may trying Rolfing Structural Integration, which is allegedly sometimes quite painful and always wildly expensive, but which is supposed to help enormously. I also listen to music that gives me energy and hope.

I’m trying to feel like a decent creative human being even when I’m not terribly productive. Therapy helps with that. So, too, does music.

I get creatively blocked now and then, lose hope, feel dispirited, or just don’t know how to stay focused. I have found throughout my life that when I can’t jackhammer through the concrete that occasionally sets in around my creative brain, a great album will do it for me.

Again and again, I return to music for sustenance, for succor, for strength. Music is something for which I have zero aptitude, and that is exactly what allows me to love it unconditionally.

Every once in awhile, music pushes my writing beyond the okay or satisfactory to something of which I’m actually proud. There are things a great album can do that coffee or Adderall or alcohol or the devil’s drink, Celsius, cannot. Chemicals can speed up the generation of words, but fantastic art is the fuel that sends the work higher.

Music can’t write a great last line for me, but it can make me want to stay alive until the end of the next song. Put a long enough playlist together, and that’ll get anybody through a dark night (or morning, or afternoon, or random Tuesday) of the soul. Music got me through this piece, and it’ll get me through the next.

I can’t sing, but if I keep hoping and praying and working and come back to the page every time I give up, maybe, if I’m blessed, if I’m lucky, if I believe in miracles or happy accidents or God or the hundred wild beasts in my brain clacking away at neural typewriters, the words will sing for me.