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Commentary
In the North, I found ‘little light’ but fierce friendships
One day in December of 2017, I remember watching the sunset out of a classroom window at 3:30, knowing that when I got out of class in an hour, it would be dark. I had come from Virginia to Maine for college, and I had at least mentally prepared for the cold. People warned me about that, of course. What they didn’t warn me about was the lack of sunlight — there were so few hours of light during the day that time itself felt scarce in a way it never had before.
It wasn’t until five years later that I first listened to the music of Noah Kahan, but Kahan’s “Northern Attitude” took me back to watching the light fade from that classroom. Kahan says in the chorus, “Forgive my northern attitude, oh I was raised on little light,” a reference to dark northern winters and the prickly disposition they cause. In 2017, I was just beginning to learn about that feeling, but my friends who grew up in the North knew it well. Kahan sings about the same dimly lit winters that shaped who they are — people who cherish their time because they know they have so little of it.
There’s more than a little New England insidership to Kahan’s music. Even the title of “Stick Season” — the song released last year that’s brought Kahan more faraway fans than ever, with a little help from TikTok — is a nod to fellow New Englanders, and one that most outsiders will miss. I had never heard of stick season, the actual season, before Kahan’s song.
Luckily, my friends from Vermont were more than willing to explain this barren, transitory time, when the leaves have all hit the ground and the first snow hasn’t come to declare it winter yet. It’s a purgatory of seasons that doesn’t feel like any of them. It’s fall without the brilliant colors and winter without the shiny parts. People are sad, bored and unsure of things. They’re waiting for winter, which isn’t great itself, but at least it’s something.
That’s a complicated mix of emotions, and it’s hard to understand if you weren’t born there. Bare trees, no snow, a general emptiness: to a southerner, stick season just sounds like winter. But New England has a winter before the winter (and after: mud season) — and those winters have a certain effect on people.
Kahan gets to the root of that effect on the song “Northern Attitude,” which opens “Stick Season,” the album. It’s one thing to romanticize the place you call home and brag about the way sunlight hits a particular kind of tree at a particular time of year. It’s another thing to tie that sunlight to yourself, and let it help explain who you are: “If I get too close, and I’m not how you hoped / Forgive my northern attitude, oh I was raised out in the cold.”
Not that everyone isn’t afraid of disappointing others, but it makes sense that this anxiety is a particularly northern one, a worry for people whose hours of light and months of warmth are preciously scarce. Northerners get a bad rap for being cold. “Kind, but not nice,” I’ve heard more than once. But layered in that attitude is a conviction that treasures the bonds that do get forged, despite the coldness.
We worry about our relationships because of how precious they are, and the scarcer they are, the more precious they become.
That conviction is alive and well in other songwriters of the North. I think of Bob Dylan on the cover of “Freewheelin’,” clutching his partner in a snowy street and asking the listener to give her a coat, even after they’ve been estranged. I think of Joni Mitchell longing for a frozen river, to skate home from a sunny December in California.
I also think of my own northern friends. They are driven and live vigorously in all seasons. I like to think that all of them act on this same conviction: if you don’t get much time with the sun, you’d better take advantage of every moment you get. The same goes for people — if you don’t grow close to many, you’d better make sure the ones you do grow close with are worth it.
It’s an unbelievable pressure to live with. But that pressure squeezes out friendships worth fighting for. Within those friendships, bridges are worth mending, and slights worth forgiving. “Forgive my northern attitude,” shouts Kahan. “I was raised on little light,” he explains.
I am not from the North, but I can understand Kahan’s attitude. I have watched the last moments of light seep away from the window of a warm classroom. I have hugged friends goodbye on frozen stoops, not knowing when I would see them again. I have broken out a lawn chair on the year’s first day over 55 degrees, enjoying the first flecks of warmth to hit my skin in some time.
I am not from the North, but against a southern attitude, I think there is something to learn from those who grew up here. New England is cold, but there’s a warmer side to the northern attitude that Kahan sings about. We worry about our relationships because of how precious they are, and the scarcer they are, the more precious they become. It’s a hard lesson to learn, but maybe it helps if you were first taught by the sun.
