Ope Pardon, No. 32: Until One of Us Caves

I have made my peace with the fact that, more likely than not, Noah Kahan will place upsettingly high in my 2023 Spotify Wrapped.

I say upsettingly high not because I am embarrassed by how much I have listened to Kahan’s music this year, as much as I am more than a little distraught by the music industry machinations that brought us here.

I can and do enjoy Kahan’s music, but as a top lobotomy candidate, I also am not fully able to do so without thinking about why I am listening to it and how I listen to it, which invariably makes me end up hating it — until a couple weeks later when I can’t decide what to listen to while I walk my dog and there he is in my Recently Played and the cycle begins again.

Allow me to elaborate.

The first time I listened to Noah Kahan’s music, I did not like it. At all. I want to say this was late spring. May or June, perhaps.

To be clear, I did expect to like it: I typically share the same taste in music as the friends I had seen on Instagram attending his shows, I had a vague recollection of hearing and liking one of his songs on a Spotify radio or through some such algorithmic suggestion. I have been, historically, a fan of first wave stomp & holler and while I do cringe at the thought of listening to Mumford & Sons again, I revisit The Lumineers quite regularly. I thought I would be an easy mark for the indie folk darling.

So I listened to his top songs — which at the time, I believe, were:

1. “Dial Drunk (feat. Post Malone)"

2. “Stick Season”

3. “Dial Drunk” (no Post Malone).

As a big fan of sad sack songs about substance abuse, I liked “Dial Drunk” enough to listen to the album it was on — top to bottom, in order, as I am wont to do. (The album is dead, long live the album.) And I found it…underwhelming! Boring and filled with filler, is what I would have said at the time, if anyone had asked — but actually I probably would not have said that even if someone asked because I try to avoid being a hater about things like music taste when there are much better things to be a hater about (genocide, for example).

I felt profoundly unmoved and thus, counterintuitively, a little thrilled. (Anytime I don’t like the zeitgeist-y thing, I feel affirmed that my tastes are my own — not because I care about being counter-culture but because it means that when I do like the zeitgeist-y thing (which is often), I am doing so because I actually like it and not because everyone else does.)

With a clarity that would not return to my decision making for another six months, I declared Noah Kahan a pass for me.

And then!!

I can’t tell you what moved me to revisit ol’ boy toward the end of July, but this second time around I liked what I liked enough to add a couple more songs officially to my “liked” list. Bestow onto them what was then still a heart in the Spotify interface.

Still, it wasn’t a healthy affair: while I liked five (!) songs now, I borderline hated the songs I didn’t like, couldn’t listen to them — which led to me only listening to my liked songs, which in turn led to me burning out very quickly on the sound because that is what happens when you listen to only five songs. Ultimately I would snap and find myself unable to listen to anything even Kahan-adjacent.

And yet every couple weeks or so, this cycle would repeat itself. (I can’t say for sure but it feels like this has happened thrice since that first time, and mathematically, that means about once a month.) I would be inclined — compelled even! — to listen to the couple songs I had liked and then would discover 1-2 more songs that I also newly liked. Loved, even!

It was around the third time, but certainly the fourth, that I began to notice what seemed to me a sneaky but harmless impetus for these cycles. Both times, Kahan had re-released a song that I previously did not like (“She Calls Me Back” and “Northern Attitude”) featuring another artist I do like (Kacey Musgraves and Hozier, respectively) which led Spotify to alerting me to the news, and led me to at least giving his “This Is Me” playlist another play, and that led to me discovering a different song I did actually like (“Caves” and “Mess”/”False Confidence”, respectively). And so, slowly but surely, his dominion of my streaming data grew.

Nonetheless, as someone who has been dragged, kicking and screaming (and stomping and hollering), into Kahan fandom in this way, it got me thinking about the use and purpose of features. More specifically, the use and purpose of re-releases with features that are only marginally different to the original song.

There is a very clear and obvious business strategy to re-releasing seemingly every song on your album: It extends the time your album is in the cultural conversation and theoretically on the charts. In some ways, it’s like reverse engineering the old system of releasing several singles preceding your album. Release the album, see what hits, then re-release those as singles with whichever big name is keen to hop on.

I don’t really believe Kahan is out here cynically using famous friends to game his streaming numbers, but the reality is each time a second version of a song is released, his fans are alerted to said new release (which is not really new) and voila we’re back listening again.

Moreover, the reality is also that Kacey and Hozier, through no real fault of their own, are not really doing much here except lending a name, one new verse and a line of code connecting their fanbases on music streaming platforms.

So, as much as I try to ignore my cynicism, the fact each of these features — which were often first premiered as live show surprises — has been formally released and not just left to the digital crates of bootleg YouTube uploads, does imply at least someone in Kahan’s camp has an eye on actual commercial strategy. And, honestly, as they should! The music industry is dire and if we’re gonna hate on re-releases, Kahan would not even be the primary defendant of that case. (That would likely be one Miss Swift and I feel confident Kahan can 1000% use whatever juice the additional streams or revenue yields more than the First Lady of the Kansas City Chiefs.)

(What’s funny about all these re-releases is the involvement of Post Malone. Honestly, what’s funny about most things involving Post Malone is the involvement of Post Malone, but more to the point, every single other artist Kahan has collaborated with has made musical sense — Wesley Schultz of The Lumineers, Zach Bryan, Musgraves and Hozier are all people you can imagine sharing the same festival bill. Post Malone, not so much! And yet he was arguably the most high profile (and possibly first?) feature on Kahan’s biggest hit, so go figure. Vibes over genre, I guess! Or just the power of a good TikTok joke — the collaboration may or may not have been manifested by one “Folk Malone” quip. I digress and have no interest in researching further.)

To his credit, Kahan himself appears as a featured artist on remixes of lesser known artists, and when you listen to Spotify’s This Is Noah Kahan playlist, you discover these too (I especially liked “MEAN!” by Madeline The Person). In this way, he is boosting their reach by the same principles from which he is profiting. That feels nice and admirable — an altruistic use of what, again, mostly amounts to singing harmony on songs that sound more or less the same.

Which is, I guess, the crux of my annoyance with these remixes. They are not meaningfully any different than the originals.

Features are famously big deals in rap. It’s not uncommon for a rapper’s most famous or even best verse to occur on a song that is not actually theirs. Features are, in fact, so common a currency in that genre that J. Cole famously “went platinum with no features” and his fans would not shut up about how this made him a better rapper than your favorite rapper. (It does not and he is embarrassed by you.)

Mostly, it feels like, when rappers feature on another song, they are usually allotted more time and space to make their presence known and felt. And even with the same amount of time, they are aspiring to be heard and remembered. Or maybe the bar is just lower for a feature when it’s the V1 and you’re not heralding it as a new release warranting new attention.

I don’t know what my point is here, to be honest.

As a sucker for friendship, mutual admiration and communism, I want to accept “because we wanted to!” as reason enough for a re-release bonanza. Just pals singing songs with their pals (or at least other artists they admire) and everyone splits an extra nickle from Spotify! But I find it wanting. I guess when you tease me with a team up, I want it to be more memorable.

In lieu of artistic justification, I default to the skeptical read that it’s all simply a smart way to connect Spotify pages and draw (or code) lines of influence and affinity between artists. Which surely isn’t the most malicious in thing in the world.

Without it, after all, I would not have given my almost-certainly most-listened-to artist of 2023 at least 2-5 extra chances to win that title.

P.S. Spotify Wrapped allegedly will drop Dec. 1 and Noah Kahan will perform on SNL on Dec. 2. That’s what we in the biz call a ✨ news peg ✨