A Soundtrack for a Painful Season

How Noah Kahan's album "Stick Season" helped us survive a family crisis

Photo by Timothy Eberly on Unsplash

If you ask my 4-year-old what her favorite song is, she might introduce you to a folk-rock banger called “Dial Drunk.” It begins, “I’m rememberin’ I promised to forget you now/ But it’s rainin’ and I’m callin’ drunk.”

I can explain.

During an especially heart-wrenching year, I stumbled across the music of Noah Kahan, a 27-year-old singer-songwriter whose album Stick Season attracted a small but passionate fanbase, at least partly due to Tik-Tok. I am nothing if not a sucker for a sad song with a catchy hook. Kahan’s album is crafted of deeply personal lyrics that still manage to feel relatable, with themes of loneliness and resentment, and references to depression and self-medication. It’s not always light-hearted listening, but manages to still be plenty of fun.

At 37 years old, my two kids and I were perhaps an unlikely audience.

Of course, this is not the first time that music has held my hand through a difficult season of life. At 14, I began working on the weekends and throughout the summer walking dogs and scooping poop for a pet boarding facility, saving all my wages to spend on pop-punk CD’s and Warped Tour tickets. As a straight-A student who had never broken a rule in her life, my parents were understandably perplexed when I started wearing only black cotton band t-shirts and studded belts, carrying my books in a messenger bag covered in safety pins and embroidered badges.

This was the early 2000’s when “emo” bands were soothing the angst of all us kids who felt a little different than the mainstream. If you are not familiar, “emo” is short for “emotional”, a genre of alternative rock that combined the intensity of rock music with lyrics straight from a 15-year-olds diary. Music was my therapy before I had actual therapy. I did not have the words to explain that I was lonely all the time and plagued by a vicious inner critic. Music gave me a language. And above all, I lived for a live show. The feeling of losing myself in a crowd, my tiny body jostling just to keep my feet on the ground, the bass coursing through us like one heartbeat.

I again found comfort in music when, after a decade of marriage and two young kids, my husband fell deep into severe depression and alcohol abuse. Let’s just say, I was feeling “emo” once again. His drinking problem was years in the making, but he had always been exceptionally high functioning. He was a model father and husband but eventually, the disease caught up with him. His body rebelled. He became caught in a constant cycle of use and withdrawal that kept him exhausted, panicked, and sick.

Within months, our boring life in our small suburban home in a lovely neighborhood became something like an episode of that show “Intervention.” For over a year, it felt as though the husband and father we knew had died. He was gone for periods of time, in treatment facilities or the hospital, sometimes up to a month at a stretch. And if he was home, he was still “gone”, drinking or preoccupied with getting his next drink.

So, when I stumbled across Stick Season, my ears knew it was exactly what my heart needed.  That album became the soundtrack of our year of survival. It was a collection of songs about feeling left behind. I began asking Alexa to play it while I did the dishes or tried to put together some semblance of a meal (my husband had always done the cooking). The kids were always underfoot, and we would sing along together while dancing around the kitchen. We took turns choosing the track, “Alexa, play ‘She Calls Me Back!’”

We rocked out together in bursts of sorely needed laughter and movement, shaking off the tension and heaviness of our day-to-day routine. During a chaotic time when we did not know what each new day might bring, the music became a comforting constant. We played it again and again.

No, the lyrics were not rated PG. I could practically feel my mother wincing when she joined us on car rides. But after everything our family had been through, some colorful language was the least of my worries. When lyrics referred to drinking alcohol, I used it as an opportunity to say, “Your dad is not the only one.” It opened the door for conversations about mental health and how to ask for help. Sometimes, the kids and I snuggled together on the couch and watched clips of Kahan on tour, and I recalled the freedom of being young in a crowd, the music so loud I felt it behind my sternum. I missed the thrum of that collective pulse. I imagined my young kids as teenagers in the not-so-distant future, finding their belonging in a crowd and a song.

You see, we held each other.

When I finally got up the nerve to tell my husband to move out, the rock-bottom that would precede him finally, blessedly, getting sober; I impulsively drove the kids 4 hours to the Maryland coast for the weekend.

First I kicked him out, expecting him to go to a hotel for a few days and figure out his next move. He snuck back in through the garage. I was not practiced at keeping him away.

Once he was finally gone for the night, I started to pack for a different hotel. Our house had become claustrophobic. It hurt too much, imagining me on one side of our locked front door, him on the other.

“Trauma and drama,” the words therapists use to describe alcoholic families, rang in my ears.

The next morning, I piled our children into the minivan with a suitcase of sweaters and warm socks instead of swimsuits. Maryland beaches are abandoned in the early Spring, it’s still too chilly for most people’s enjoyment. This was not a vacation, more like crabs scrambling to escape a boiling pot.

At least the sun was shining and Noah was cued up on my phone. We listened to the same 14 tracks the entire drive there and back, singing at the top of our lungs. The kids bickered over what song to play next, “Number 6! Number 14!”

“Number 14, please” I emphasized as I scanned for the right track.

We drove and we sang, even though the passenger seat was empty. We sang as we crossed the 4.5 mile bridge that stands 180 feet above the ocean bay, as high as seagulls. Even with the windows closed, the air tasted like salt, and the choppy blue water stretched towards the horizon on both sides. On a trip I had been taking my whole life, it was a view that made me feel like anything was possible.

A note on writing about our loved ones: As of this writing, my husband is strong in his recovery and we are so, so grateful. We know how fortunate we are to have had access to resources to get him the help he needed. He also fought like hell. He was my hero before his addiction, even more so now. He reads everything I share about this part of our lives, and I would not share without his approval. I am so fortunate that he sees the value in me writing my truth. We also feel strongly that we want to help other families facing addiction, by decreasing stigma and sharing hope.

I am currently working on a memoir about my family history of addiction which I consider to be an intergenerational trauma. If you enjoyed this piece, please stick around for future stories and updates on my memoir progress.

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