Noah Kahan Joins Forces With Sam Fender to Deliver Dreamy Rendition of Homesick
2023’s biggest breakthrough artist, Noah Kahan, has teamed up with North Shields native, Sam Fender, to re-record, Homesick, and it’s everything fans could have asked for.
The American singer-songwriter, famed for his 2022 indie/folk album Stick Season, recently hinted at a collaborative track with an undisclosed artist. Fans were eager to speculate that Fender was the featured voice, and they were correct to do so.
Fender lends his vocals to Homesick for a verse reflecting his upbringing in the Northern city of Newcastle. The song delves into Kahan’s complex connection with his Vermont hometown, an almost uncanny parallel to much of Fender’s work. And vocally, that synergy continues. The amalgamation of their musical styles doesn’t just avoid any sense of incongruence; instead, it effortlessly intertwines, highlighting a remarkably authentic trans-Atlantic unity.
Speaking on the collaboration, Noah said, “When I first heard Sam’s music, I stopped what I was doing, started 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 a thousand 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. This song was the final push for me to start writing about my own experiences.”
Sam added, “I was told Noah wanted us to work together, and I’d heard the tune ‘Homesick’ and thought it was a lush song. We then 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.”
Kahan is gearing up for a return to Europe with a lineup of arena dates running throughout February 2024, while details surrounding Fender’s eagerly awaited third album are being kept tightly under wraps.
