Home(sick)

“A boat beside a dock in the sunlight/Nothing but the water and the sunrise now”  —Noah Kahan, “Maine.”

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One evening this past summer, I sat down with my family to have dinner in our New York apartment. We took our places around the dining table that is crammed into the small foyer that we use as a dining room, and my mother recounted something she remembered from a time when she was living at home in Maine in her mid-20s. “I drove to the Walmart one day, just to get out for a while,” she recalled. “I got a cup of coffee and sat down at the little cafe in the store, and two guys who were probably about my age sat down next to me and started talking. ‘So, you’re getting married?’ one of them said to the other. ‘Yep’ the other man responded in a thick Maine accent. ‘She’s a smaht one. She’s from New Hampsha.’” I laughed, assuming the joke lay in the man being so provincial that he thought there was such a big difference between people from New Hampshire and people from Maine, but it turned out I was mistaken. “The sad thing is that New Hampshire people really are better educated than Maine people,” my mom responded, and I had to confront that I didn’t know quite as much as I thought I did when she began her little anecdote.

For most of my life, I never questioned how much I understood Maine. Although I could see for myself that its rurality was significantly different than the urban environment I was being raised in, it never felt very out of the ordinary. It was always just the place where my mother had grown up, where her mother and sister and half siblings and plenty of further extended family all lived. It was one of the only places I grew up traveling to, spending a couple weeks in the summer and a week at Christmas in my grandmother’s 19th Century wood-frame house in her picturesque coastal town. I have known Maine since before I was a year old; it has always been familiar to me, despite the fact that I have never resided there for longer than a month at a time. I find that I care about it and have just as much interest in it as the state I grew up in, even though I’ve never known firsthand what it is like to live there.

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The first time I heard a Noah Kahan song, it was not Noah Kahan singing it. It was the summer of 2022 and his song “Stick Season” had just come out as a single, eventually going on to launch the Vermont native into singer-songwriter fame. I was home for the summer, sitting on my bed one day and mindlessly scrolling through TikTok when a video of someone covering “Stick Season” popped up on my personalized algorithm. “I love Vermont, but its the season of the sticks,” the man sang, that chorus catching my ear solely because I didn’t think I had ever heard Vermont referenced in a song before. The full song immediately drew me in with its incredibly vivid and specific lyrics. Lines like “I’ll dream each night of some version of you/That I might not have, but I did not lose” struck me as containing such an incredible amount of emotion in such a focused and directed way.

Kahan’s next single, “Northern Attitude,” came out the following September. I had just moved to Colorado to attend college, my first time living in a different part of the country. I was blown away by his music again, but this time not only because of the top-notch songwriting. The chorus of “If I get too close and I'm not how you hoped/Forgive my northern attitude, oh, I was raised out in the cold/If the sun don't rise 'til the summertime/Forgive my northern attitude, oh, I was raised on little light” seemed like the best description of winter I had ever heard. I felt like someone had put words to the feeling of every Northeast winter I had lived through in my entire life up to that point, and it was exactly what I wanted to hear amidst the shock of starting a new life in a place that felt so different. “It’s a crime that I have to listen to this new Noah Kahan single in sunny Colorado,” I texted from my dorm room, sunlight streaming in through my windows, to my friend Ava, who I knew was a fan and who had just started at Colby College. “It’s hitting different in Maine,” she wrote back, reminding me even more that I was farther than ever from the places I recognized.

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Although Noah Kahan is from Vermont and my extended family lives in Maine, the elements of rural New England that both places share is something that I hear across the Stick Season album, which came out just after “Northern Attitude” was released as a promotional single. I hear that extremely specific place in many of the album’s verses. “I’ll love you when the oceans dry/I’ll love you when the rivers freeze,” from the second verse of “She Calls Me Back,” seems to come so clearly to me from the experience of living in a land of coastline, cold inland rivers and even colder inland temperatures. I hear it in the smallest of lines. “Don’t know whether you want a place in the coast or the country,” from “Still,” is such a New England line in just the tiny, precise amount of knowledge it takes to know what the difference between the coastline and the countryside is, and to recognize the difference at all. I even hear it in some of Stick Season’s song titles. There’s something to be said of the fact that “The View Between Villages” is even called that, that it even uses the word villages instead of towns, and that something that small could be so emblematic of a place.

And I do, of course, hear it in entire songs. “And every photograph/That’s taken here is from the summer,” from the first verse of “Homesick,” is shockingly brutal every single time I hear it. It relates so inherently to the coastal Maine towns that my extended family members live in, places overwhelmed with tourists in the summer and painfully quiet the rest of the year. “Well, I'm tired of dirt roads/Named after high school friends' grandfathers,” the opening line of the second verse, brings me back to any tiny road through a forest with an English-sounding name that I have ever traversed. “I’m mean,” Kahan says straightforwardly on the chorus, with the inflection of a sly smile, “because I grew up in New England.” I’ve always heard that line as bitterly sarcastic, playing off a regional stereotype to defend himself from an insult, but most interpretations I’ve seen seem to think that he is being serious. Truthfully, I’m not sure who is right—I would be lying if I said I didn’t have family members who could reasonably fit such a description.

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I went on a rock climbing trip one day the following spring after Stick Season had come out, up to a state park in the Rockies. Going climbing outdoors consists of perhaps one quarter getting to the climbing area and setting everything up, one quarter actually climbing, and the other half standing around with whoever else you came with, waiting to climb again. To fill this abundant amount of waiting time, someone on the trip had brought along a bluetooth speaker so that we could listen to music as we waited under the sunshine at the foot of the cliff face, overlooking a sweeping view of the valley we had hiked up from. At some point, “All My Love” came on, and I felt a brief amount of excitement in liking music that other people seemed to like too.

But over time, as I stayed far from home and the homesickness for the East that I had felt from the very beginning did not go away, this excited feeling of being around other fans of music that I liked eventually dissipated and was replaced with the exact opposite feeling. I eventually began to feel resentful of the other people at my school who listened to Stick Season. “You don’t understand it like I do,” I began to think about Kahan’s fans who did not have any connection to rural New England, meaning most everybody I was around. “You can’t like it. Only I can like it,” I thought, thinking that my more personal understanding of Kahan’s lyrics entitled me to an ownership over the enjoyment of them. I know that this is wrong, that someone else’s enjoyment of something shouldn’t affect how I feel about it. I don’t think about it as much anymore, but occasionally I do still take note of my understanding of Stick Season’s lyrics in relation to others.

Last spring, on a rainy Connecticut afternoon, I was in the backseat of my parent’s car, driving home down the Merritt Parkway from a short visit to Maine. I was once again looking at TikTok, and a video came up of Kahan performing “Homesick” to an enormous crowd at Fenway Park. The woman who posted the video captioned it cheekily, writing “This song is the Boston national anthem.” Maybe it was because I had just been in Maine and was sad to leave it, as I always am, but I decided to take that unserious caption personally. “I hate how this song has been co-opted by people from wealthy Massachusetts suburbs,” I commented. “This song is not about New England. It is about rural New England.” In commenting that, I firmly believed that I was correct, that that woman and everyone singing along in the crowd were trying to co-opt a song that is decidedly not about them, a fact that is obvious if one pays attention to any of the lyrics of “Homesick” besides the chorus. I firmly believed that Kahan would agree with me. I also knew by that point that I was not from the place I was defending, and so I had no real right to claim that defense myself.

About a year ago, I had to unexpectedly travel to Maine for a funeral. Coincidentally, I happened to arrive the day after the deadliest mass shooting in the state’s history. It had occurred in the city where my older cousin and her children lived, leaving me incredibly unsettled. I was grateful to be there, to see with my own eyes that Maine seemed the same as it had always been. “If you’ve ever lived in Maine, you know that the whole state feels like a small town,” Ava wrote on her Instagram story in a heartfelt message about the shooting. “Is that true?” I asked my mom the next day in the rustic, wood paneled house that we were renting. “Of course,” she replied. “There’s only a million people in the whole state.” It was hard for me to grasp at first that Ava, someone who had never set foot in Maine before visiting her college there, now knew more about it than I did. I realized that I could no longer pretend to myself that I was the utmost authority on Maine, finally understanding that there were some things about it that I just couldn’t get unless I lived there too.

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I listen to at least some songs from Stick Season nearly every day. What that album and my understanding of it has showed me is that different people can have different understandings of a place based on where they grew up and how, or if, they know it. “Stick Season is not a country album,” I saw someone declare in a YouTube comment once, under a video that named “Paul Revere,” from Stick Season’s deluxe version, one of the best country songs of 2023. But I think it most certainly is a country album, and a very good one at that. Its numerous lyrical mentions to dirt roads and small towns and the phrase “out here” betray any notion that it couldn’t be country. It is simply a country album that is deeply indebted to the rural Northeast, and I have to argue that to not recognize it as country is simply to not know the place that it is about.

There is undoubtedly a special kind of understanding of a place that you can only have if you grow up there, and another kind if you have lived somewhere for long enough. But, as someone who grew up near almost no extended family, it seems natural to me to also feel a kind of ownership over the place where your family lives, whether you have ever lived there yourself or not. I can’t not hear rural New England all over Stick Season, the meaning and connotations of its lyrics seeping into my mind whether I’d like them to or not. They are not something that I have to work to understand, so I know that my understanding must be real, that it must be inherent. I can also accept now that I do not have the same understanding of that land as Noah Kahan, or my friend Ava, or my mother, or my grandmother, who moved to the Midcoast region of Maine from Long Island in the early 1970s and never had any desire to leave.

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I can vividly picture standing on a wooden dock, floating in the middle of a pond one summer when I was a child. I jumped off into the dark, cool water and thought to myself  “only in Maine.” Although that experience could have happened elsewhere, and I now know that it isn't completely unique in many respects, Maine is still far and away my favorite place in the world. I am certain that I could visit every state, province and country on earth and still feel that way. I love the pine trees. I love the grey rocks of the coastline. I love the autumn foliage. I love the red brick sidewalks of Portland. I love the inland mountains and wilderness so vast that even someone from out west could find it impressive. I love every one of the thousands of lakes and ponds. I love when the snow blankets the landscape all winter. I love the fog that hangs around the coastline, a near-weekly presence in the summers. I love the always freezing, Gulf Stream-deprived ocean water, its salt in your mouth and chill on your skin shocking you into remembering that you are alive every time you dive into it.

One of my biggest, if not my biggest goal for my future, is to eventually live in Maine when I am done with school. My grandmother grew up in New York City and moved to Maine. My mother grew up in Maine and moved to New York. Now, I grew up in New York and want to move to Maine. A family cycle up and down the East Coast; the consequences of putting down your roots someplace new and then sharing where you came from with your children. “I just tell my kids to make sure they have a job lined up if they want to live there,” my mother once said to someone about Maine, seemingly resigning herself to the prospect of her children wanting to live in a state she left behind. But while the statement encompassed both her children, I knew that in all likelihood it only applied to me. My sister, still in high school in New York, dreams of attending a state university and working for the state government as a biologist. She is satisfied with the State of New York in a way I am not, and I think I do understand why.

Few can truly feel Maine’s pull. But, in my experience, those like me that do feel it will feel it immensely. They will deeply know that indescribable sense that draws in those who are hardy enough to live there and doesn’t let them feel at home anywhere else. If I am ever so lucky as to attain my goal, I hope to take my different understanding of Maine with me and build my own life there. Eventually, I hope that my knowledge of it would grow, leaving me with an even deeper understanding and appreciation of rural New England and the lyrics of Stick Season.