I feel like a stranger in my own home.
I said that to my sister a week and a half ago, the moment we stepped into our hometown Target. It was said for comedic value; I worked at that Target for three years after high school, up until I moved states, and it had clearly undergone a major remodel in the time between this Christmas and last Christmas. I suddenly didn’t know where anything was. Humidifiers were no longer in J32, the fitting room had grey walls rather than red, there were median-type mannequin displays in the walkways. You ever feel like a stranger in your own home?
Sometimes I forget that central Indiana doesn’t exist in limbo, merely a time capsule for me to dig out every time I’m feeling nostalgic—sometimes I forget that the people I grew up with grew up too, that they didn’t go into stasis pods the moment I zipped out of town, that they don’t think about me just as much as I don’t think about them.
All of this to say, I’m here to talk about two albums: Stick Season by Noah Kahan and 5SOS5 by 5 Seconds of Summer.
Stick Season is about going home and every complicated emotion that you pack into the back of your car. 5SOS5 feels like coming home—something in my bones settles around minute three of “Take My Hand”. They’re different albums on the whole but I can’t seem to untangle my emotions surrounding either.
With past 5SOS albums, I’ve had to ask myself the question: Are two or three songs enough to make me love the whole album? And the answer’s been no. With this one, the answer is yes. Can I differentiate between most of the songs? Not without looking at the track list. Yet something here just inherently works. The rest of the album builds an intricate soundscape as background noise for the two songs that are emotionally decimating. It’s the nostalgia, it’s in my bloodstream, it’s the here and now and the yesterday and tomorrow.
Stick Season is… not like that. This album crawls under your skin and makes a home there. You have to live with it for weeks. You have to blast it at a too-high volume as you speed down back roads towards your hometown for the holidays. Each song paints a life lived, a story told, a memory dug out of the chest you forgot was in the hall closet. Even the songs I didn’t like as much at first—Strawberry Wine—the more I listened, the more I realized that those things are never coming back. Those days are never coming back.
Home is a complicated thing. The reason I’m talking about two albums at once is this: Stick Season is reality undercut with melancholia while 5SOS5 is melancholia undercut with reality. It’s hard not to romanticize the place you grew up and the place that grew you. Home is reality and melancholia and wistful mornings and nostalgic midnights. Home is visceral. I went home for the holidays this year and I felt more awake than ever. More detached. I can’t tell if it was better or worse like that. My hometown has changed so much since I lived there. It has an IKEA and a TopGolf. There’s a skyline, now. I remember when Marsh was the coolest building I’d ever seen.
There’s nothing to romanticize here. There are just stoplights and construction cones. You have to drive everywhere, but not the open-road-corn-field type of driving. They built an assisted living home that specializes in memory care on the empty lot next to my junior high school. Towns can be walkable and kids can still feel stranded at home. I walked two miles home from high school, one of which was through the subdivision. It was a big, winding, streets twisting through land and stretching on for longer than any one—four interconnected—neighborhoods should type of place. Healing, grief, and nostalgia are three crows perched on the power line across from my old elementary school. One of them represents home but I still don’t know which.
I haven’t lived in Indiana in going on five years. I feel like a stranger in my own home. But then, it’s not really home anymore, is it? Five years doesn’t look like much written down but it was half my twenties, and, on the other side of twenty-five, that feels like half my life.
Home can be people and places, chapters in a book, pictures hanging on a wall—5SOS5 encapsulates this. “Best Friends” is my high school group chat; something about surviving adolescence together forges a friendship that never stops being important, even if it doesn’t look the way it used to. “Easy For You To Say” and “Bleach” reflect on metamorphosis; I’m not who I was, but that doesn’t mean I should forget who I was. I’m still working on this. Every now and then, an album comes out that really hits where you are emotionally. It feels like it was written just for you. That’s what 5SOS5 is for me. It’s the strings in “Bad Omens” and minute three of “Take My Hand” and the ending of “Red Line”.
But home is also a gaping wound. A broken bone that never quite healed right. An ache so deep-seated, I must’ve been born with it. Noah Kahan understands this well. “New Perspective” finds me as both narrator and subject. “Come Over” reminds me of something I want to forget. There’s a lyric in “Homesick” that I’d like to juxtapose with one in a song called “Summer Storms” by Jake Etheridge: I would leave if only I could find a reason versus Guess your reasons for not leaving just ran out. I’m far too introspective for my own good. “Still” and “Halloween” meet me there. “The View Between Villages” is an ending and a beginning and just what being in your twenties is like.
All of this to say, I’m writing this at home, on Christmas Day, in my favorite chair, in a state that is not Indiana. The buildings are taller here. The newspaper isn’t as small-minded. The weather is worse right now, but I’ll take the trade-off.