Noah Kahan has teamed up with Sam Fender on a collaborative new single, ‘Homesick’ – you can listen to it below.
The US singer-songwriter recently teased a joint song with a mystery artist, with many fans correctly guessing that Fender was singing on it. Later, the ‘Seventeen Going Under’ star confirmed the collab on social media.
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Today (January 19) Kahan has released a new version of ‘Homesick’ featuring Fender. The original version of the track appears on Kahan’s 2022 album ‘Stick Season’. Per a press release, the cut tackles his “complicated relationship” with his Vermont hometown.
On the single, Kahan addresses the juxtaposing feelings of wanting to escape and chase his dreams but also always wanting to return home. His new collaborator Fender often writes about his life growing up in North Shields – a working-class, former shipbuilding town in England’s northeast.
Speaking about how their collab came about, Kahan explained: “When I first heard Sam Fender’s music, I stopped what I was doing, started [playing] ‘Dead Boys’ from the beginning, and listened four more times. It was everything I loved about a song.
“I followed this artist like a crazy person, checking every day to see if he had dropped new music. Reading every lyric and looking for his interpretation of what they meant. I must have listened to ‘Hypersonic Missiles’ 1,000 times before ‘Seventeen Going Under’ came out, and I had never felt so connected to a song.
“I come from a very different place than Sam did, that much was clear in the lyrics, but it felt like I had grown up the same. The nostalgia, pride, bitterness, confusion, and anger that Sam wrote about feeling was so similar to what I was feeling about my childhood and my hometown at the time.”
He added: “This song was the final push for me to start writing about my own experiences.”
Kahan went on to recall how ‘Seventeen Going Under’ was “the very first song we listened to” as he began to write his record ‘Stick Season’. “The song ‘Homesick’ was born out of the confidence instilled in me by listening to someone accurately depict their hometown and what it means to them, for better or for worse,” he said.
“When I found out I’d be able to spend the day in Newcastle with Sam, I was nervous but excited. He welcomed me with open arms, let me into his world, showed me places in this community that held so much significance not only to the town, but to Sam himself.”
Kahan remembered how he “felt very much like an outsider” initially, but said he “did start to understand where these songs were coming from, and just how special of a guy Sam really is”.
He added: “He did an absolutely amazing job bringing his experience into my song ‘Homesick’. He went above and beyond and I truly can’t thank him enough. I hope you enjoy this glance into our worlds, and that it offers you the same connection that I felt when I first heard this dude sing.”
Fender, meanwhile, said he thought the original version of ‘Homesick’ was “a lush song”. After being approached to work with Kahan, the pair “spoke on the phone and immediately hit it off”.
“I loved the idea of the song being a transatlantic call-and-response between two young kids desperate to escape their hometowns,” he explained. “The ‘running away’ theme has been done to death by myself, and many other artists over the last 50 years, but it’s relatable.
“Noah actually came to my hometown of Newcastle when he was on tour, so we met up and I showed him around. I found it canny funny and flattering as he said in his east coast American accent, ‘I wanna see where these songs came from, man’.
“So we hit the Lowlights Tavern for a swift Guinness and walked in the bitter cold of the seafront. Chatting with him about things in both of our pasts made me realise how universal ‘Homesick’ is. We’ve all been that kid.”
Fender recorded his parts for the collaboration in North Shields, “literally overlooking the ‘static cranes’ that I mention in my verse; it’s a stone’s throw from the estate in which the riots took place in the early 90’s”.
“It made me proud of my hometown, and my people,” he said. “The Geordies are a hilarious bunch, resilient and impermeable to hard times and hard drinking; my hometown is a constant source of inspiration.
“Noah is great lad, a canny chanter and a mean wordsmith. I love the track, and I can’t wait for people to hear it.”
Kahan is set to embark on a UK and European headline tour this summer. The run of dates includes two shows at The O2 in London, as well as stop-offs in Manchester, Newcastle and Birmingham.
Next month, he’ll head to the UK and Ireland for concerts in Dublin, Glasgow, Leeds, Cardiff and London. Find any remaining tickets here.
Kahan is nominated for the Best New Artist award at the Grammys 2024, which are due to take place in Los Angeles on February 4.
In other news, Sam Fender last week shared a soulful new song called ‘Iris’, taken from the soundtrack to the film Jackdaw.
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