I just made took my brownies out of the oven in my new kitchen, listening to Noah Kahan's new Live from Fenway album. I've listened to these songs a million times, many of them from Stick Season, one of my favorite albums in existence. I've seen them performed before - it was not quite two months into my freshman year, when he was performing a rescheduled show at the Calvin Theater in Northampton, Massachusetts. Somehow, that was almost two years ago. Noah is a lot more famous now, and I highly doubt I'll see him in that small of a venue ever again - hence the live album recorded at Fenway Park.
No matter how many times I have listened to these songs, live or otherwise, there was something much different about hearing his commentary to a full stadium. Opening with a greeting to New England, mentioning that one of his songs was written right there in Massachusetts, hearing the words of his songs sung back to him by the people filling the seats at Fenway Park. I know how it feels to have seen him at the Calvin Theater, an audience of 1,350. But I certainly don't know how it feels to be on the other side of that, remembering the shows at small theaters, just a couple years ago - and to look out into a stadium crowd, especially in the place you've written all your songs about, and to hear the words screamed back to you. I'm not a songwriter, I don't dream about being in his place. But I still think that's pretty cool to think about, to look at his success story and wonder what he must be thinking. At some points, we don't have to wonder, because he vocalizes what he's thinking: I don't deserve this shit, thank you.
He yells Boston! more than I've ever heard someone yell a city's name during their show. I'm not a representative of where we're from, he says, we're all representatives of where we're from. Unlike a lot of the people who attended that show, I'm not from New England, so I can't claim to share that part of his origin story. But I love how he connects with the people that do, maybe a bit more than the rest of us. And hey, both at the Calvin Theater and Fenway, he gave a little shoutout to a certain subsection of his fanbase that I can claim to be apart of: this one's for all the children of divorce out there, this is "All My Love."
One of my favorites is "You're Gonna Go Far," which hadn't been released at the time of his Calvin Theater show. I loved his live addition to the song's lyrics, though, shouted at Fenway:we'll all be here forever... god damn right we will. That's what I like about live albums. They capture the whole audience, a group of people that will never collectively be in the same room ever again. But here are their voices, playing in my kitchen.
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