Noah Kahan, Stick Season, and the Streaming-Era Folk Revival

## The Album That Took a Year to Break

Noah Kahan released Stick Season on October 14, 2022. It debuted at a respectable but unremarkable spot on the Billboard 200 and got the usual coverage given to a respectfully produced singer-songwriter album. Twelve months later, it was the most-streamed folk album in the country, and the title track had climbed into the Billboard Hot 100 top ten. The deluxe edition, Stick Season (We'll All Be Here Forever), released in June 2023, added new material that itself spent another year working its way up the charts. By the time Kahan received a Best New Artist nomination at the 2024 GRAMMYs, Stick Season had spent more than 18 months at the heart of contemporary folk-pop streaming.

The slow climb is the structural story. Stick Season was not a viral phenomenon. It was a steady accumulation, driven by playlists, by a tour that kept selling out larger and larger rooms, and by an audience that kept telling friends to listen. The pattern looks like the way folk and country albums built audiences in earlier decades, just adapted for the streaming era. The structural significance of the pattern, for the broader music industry, is that it ran against the assumption that streaming-era releases need to capture momentum in their first few weeks or risk fading entirely. Stick Season demonstrated that an album can be allowed to build over many months if the underlying material rewards repeat listening and the tour infrastructure supports steady audience growth.

Strafford, Vermont, as a Lyric Setting

The most distinctive thing about Stick Season is its insistent regional specificity. Kahan grew up in Strafford, Vermont, and the album refuses to translate its setting into the generic small-town language that pop-country songs typically use. The songs reference specific Vermont weather phenomena, like the gray weeks between fall foliage and winter snow that the locals call "stick season," and specific Vermont anxieties, like the conflict between leaving a small town for opportunity and feeling the loss of a community that does not have many people in it to begin with.

"Northern Attitude" addresses this directly, asking the listener to forgive him for the emotional reserve he attributes to a New England upbringing. "Homesick" makes its premise explicit in the title. "New Perspective" addresses the change in a place over time, in a way that the listener does not need to be from Vermont to understand. The cumulative effect is that the album builds a coherent emotional geography. By the end of the record, the listener has a clear sense of where these songs come from and why that matters.

The decision to lean into regional specificity is part of what made the album travel. Audiences in other parts of the world responded to the consistency of the setting, not because they recognized Vermont, but because the songs felt like they came from a place rather than from a focus group. The structural lesson, for other folk-pop songwriters, is that specificity often travels further than generality. The Stick Season audience that found the album in 2023 and 2024 included a substantial international listenership, including in countries where Vermont is essentially an abstraction. The specificity gave those listeners something to project onto rather than something to be excluded from.

The Folk Production Logic and the Collaboration Strategy

Stick Season is produced primarily by Gabe Simon, who built the album's instrumentation around banjo, acoustic guitar, mandolin, and stacked vocal harmonies. The production references the contemporary indie-folk lineage that runs through Mumford and Sons, The Lumineers, and Bon Iver, but with a particular emphasis on patient arrangement and audible craft. The banjo lines are inflected with bluegrass technique, not just used as texture. The harmonies are arranged like folk-tradition stacks, with the upper voices doing genuine harmonic work rather than doubling the lead.

The production logic has implications for the audience. Stick Season sounds like an album that can be played on radio formats from folk to pop to country to AAA without losing its identity. That kind of cross-format adaptability is one of the structural advantages folk-pop has over more genre-specific contemporary pop, and Kahan and Simon exploited it. By the time the deluxe edition arrived, the album's tracks had been picked up by formats that would not have considered the original 2022 release.

The Stick Season (We'll All Be Here Forever) deluxe expansion in 2023 added an unusual collaboration roster for a folk-pop album. Post Malone joined for "Dial Drunk," Hozier joined for "Northern Attitude," Kacey Musgraves later joined for a 2024 country-leaning re-recording of the title track, and HAIM took on a reworked "She Calls Me Back." Each collaboration is structurally interesting because it positions Kahan inside a different genre ecosystem without changing the underlying song.

The Post Malone "Dial Drunk" version pushed the song onto country and pop radio simultaneously, a feat almost no other folk-pop track in 2023 managed. The Hozier "Northern Attitude" version paired Kahan with another of the streaming-era folk revival's defining voices, signaling that the two artists were part of a coherent musical conversation. The Kacey Musgraves "Stick Season" version pushed the song into country streaming, where it found a second audience that had not been part of the original Vermont-folk crowd. The collaboration strategy turned a successful folk-pop album into a multi-genre cross-pollination event.

The Folk Revival, Contextualized

Stick Season is the most visible recent example of a broader streaming-era folk revival that includes Hozier, Mt. Joy, The Lumineers, Tyler Childers, Sierra Ferrell, Zach Bryan, and others. The revival is not coherent stylistically. Some of these artists lean toward bluegrass, some toward chamber folk, some toward country-folk, some toward Irish-traditional. What they share is a structural willingness to use acoustic instruments at the center of contemporary pop sound and to trust that audiences can be built without the production maximalism that dominated 2010s pop.

What is interesting about the revival is that streaming, which was supposed to favor short attention spans and immediate hooks, has actually been kind to it. Folk songs build slowly. They reward repeat listening. The streaming algorithms, by feeding listeners similar material once they have engaged with a folk track, end up creating a sustained-listening environment that benefits patient material. Stick Season's year-long climb is partly a product of that algorithmic logic.

The Busyhead Project and the Tour That Did the Work

In 2023 Kahan launched the Busyhead Project, named after his 2019 debut album, to direct tour-revenue proceeds to mental-health nonprofits. The initiative is part of a broader pattern across the streaming-era folk revival: a number of these artists, especially Hozier and Kahan, have positioned the emotional weight of their songwriting as part of a public mental-health conversation. The framing is intentional, supportive, and grounded in references to professional resources rather than glamorization of distress.

The Busyhead Project also has the practical effect of giving Kahan's audience a participatory dimension to the tour beyond the show itself. The structural lesson, for other artists, is that a clear nonprofit partnership can deepen audience engagement without feeling cynical, provided the partnership is real and the framing is honest.

The Stick Season tour, which began in modest theaters in 2022, had expanded into arenas and amphitheaters by 2024 and into stadiums by 2025. The structural logic of the tour matches the album's logic: a patient build, an audience-by-audience conversion, a refusal to over-extend. Kahan's live show centers on his songwriting voice and the ensemble's instrumental performance, with relatively spare staging compared to the spectacle-pop tours that share the summer touring calendar.

The Fenway Park run in summer 2024, when Kahan played the Boston stadium to mark his career-to-date peak, became one of the defining live-folk moments of the era. The visual of a folk-pop singer playing a Major League Baseball stadium to a sold-out crowd of fans singing along to lyrics about Vermont was the moment the streaming-era folk revival could no longer be described as niche.

What Stick Season Will Mean

If the streaming-era folk revival continues to expand, Stick Season will be looked back on as one of its foundational albums. The combination of regional specificity, patient production, multi-genre collaboration, and a slow-build commercial arc set a template for what folk-pop in the 2020s can be. Kahan's next studio album, whenever it arrives, will be one of the most-watched releases in folk-pop. The expectations are now substantial. But the playbook has been written, and it belongs to him.

What is interesting about the Stick Season precedent, for the rest of the folk-pop economy, is that the album's success has not been narrowly attributable to a single viral moment. The slow accumulation of audience over more than a year is the kind of pattern that does not depend on platform-specific timing. Subsequent folk-pop releases that have followed similar patient-build trajectories have been able to draw on the Stick Season template as a model. The streaming economy that was supposed to favor immediate attention has, in folk-pop, made room for the opposite: a release model in which the album is allowed to find its audience over months rather than weeks, with each new collaboration and tour leg adding to the cumulative reach. The Stick Season experiment has confirmed that the model works, and the next generation of folk-pop artists is already building on it.