Song Discussion- Noah Kahan’s “Paul Revere”
One of the things that’s always appealed to me about alternative country is the breadth and variety of regions and locations the sound can be found. Whilst mainstream country is obviously everywhere, its base is quite clearly Nashville, Tennessee. It’s an organized racket, in some ways, with Music Row serving as mission control.
Alternative country, on the other hand, has never gotten organized enough to be found in a central location. The country rock movement was a Southern California operation. Los Angeles was home to X, Los Lobos, and The Blasters who all, in turn, influenced Dwight Yoakam. The legendary alternative country movement in the 90s defined by Uncle Tupelo was midwest at its core. And bands like .357 String Band counted Wisconsin as their home in the aughts.
The American Northeast, and, more specifically, New England has been rather devoid of any major alternative country revival. But a recent song from Vermont native and indie-pop turned folkie artist Noah Kahan’s expanded edition of Stick Season hit me exactly how like many of my favorite alt-country rockers have before.
I can’t count myself as a long-time Noah Kahan fan. The first time I even spent an extended amount of time with his music was last winter after the release of Stick Season, his third full-length record. Unlike the first two, however, Stick Season was decidedly folk-centric. And I don’t mean pop folk that makes someone roll their eyes. I mean straight-forward modern folk that wouldn’t seem out-of-place at Americana Fest.
I don’t want to spend too much time on the album itself as that warrants a separate discussion, but I did want to mention the sense of place. New England landscapes permeate the record. Cold winters and snowy logging roads. Falling leaves and hues of orange, red, and violet. Indeed, a line from “Northern Attitude,” the first song off the album, sums up the direction and thematic setting the music takes, Kahan sings, “If I get too close, and I’m not how you hoped/Forgive my northern attitude, oh, I was raised out in the cold.”
Kahan, who had a hand in writing all of the songs on the record (in fact, most of the songs were solo writes), anchored the album with vignettes about wanting to escape his small Vermont hometown and yet for various reasons finding it unable to escape him.
And that leads us to “Paul Revere,” released recently on the expanded Stick Season (We’ll All Be Here Forever). While the majority of Noah Kahan’s new material is folk, “Paul Revere,” is an alternative country fan’s dream in both music and lyric. The sense of place. An area untouched for years finally succumbing to the crushing inevitability of progress. References to legendary figures in the region’s past.
The chorus is essentially a New England-inspired companion to Steve Earle’s “Someday,” although much less hopeful. Kahan sings, “One day I’m gonna cut it clear, ride like Paul Revere/And when they ask me who I am, I’ll pretend I just didn’t hear.”
“I’m not from around here,” Kahan continues, in response to a stranger asking him where he’s from. It’s a fantasy that seems like it’ll never be achieved. The character is destined to fade away year-after-year without ever escaping the place that shaped and formed him despite spending the entire song dreaming about how he could do that very thing.
The outro of the song finds Kahan slowly drifting back to reality as he observes the “patch of grass where we buried the dog/And the world makes sense behind a chain-link fence.” He desperately and frustratingly sings, “If I could leave, I would’ve already left.” All of a sudden, we wonder what’s really keeping him there. Is he staying because he has no means of leaving? Or is he staying because there’s a sense of comfort “behind that chain-link fence” that he’ll never be able to find? And the comfort of his stale, dull hometown is worth hanging around for?
There’s a striking comparison I found between “Paul Revere” and a couple of Uncle Tupelo songs- “Whiskey Bottle” and “Life Worth Livin’.” Both songs feature an outside observer singing about the very character Noah Kahan appears as in “Paul Revere.” In “Whiskey Bottle,” Jay Farrar sings, “There’s a trouble around, it’s never far away/The same trouble’s been around for a life and a day.” We can find this attitude even more poignantly in “Life Worth Livin,” as Farrar sings, “It seems everybody wants what someone else has/There’s sorrow enough for all, just go in any bar and ask.” The chorus itself could’ve been written about the narrator of “Paul Revere,” as Farrar sings, “This song is for anyone that’s listening, this song is for the broken-spirited man/This song is for anyone left standing, after the strain of a slow, sad end.”
I like to imagine the narrator of “Paul Revere” riding around his small New England town listening to those Uncle Tupelo lyrics and wondering about that life worth living and if he could ever muster the courage to move beyond that chain link fence. It’s an inherant theme in alternative country music- a reckoning with the past that keeps one from sometimes pursuing and finding what they’re looking for. The inner demons that are lingering just beneath the surface. And yet, it’s often that sometimes hopeless, senseless optimism that causes us to relate to those greats of alternative country music. Uncle Tupelo. Old 97s. Son Volt. Bruce Springsteen’s narrator in “Reason to Believe.” I’m more than fine with adding Noah Kahan’s perspective in “Paul Revere” to that list.
