PicoBlog

I believe in signs. That makes me sound woo-woo, but as my late aunt Roz used to say, “It is what it is.” Often the signs connect to tell a story, and telling stories has always been my way of making sense of my life. On March 29, when my husband, David, and I were fortunate enough see Noah Kahan in concert, another story came full circle.

It was my son, also named Noah, who introduced me to Kahan’s music, probably while we were in the car, which is where he usually introduces me to artists he figures I’ll like. I’m a sucker for anything with guitars, mandolins, banjos, and thoughtful lyrics, which is pretty much what has rocketed Kahan to fame over the last few years.

By November 2023, when Noah and I took a road trip from Vancouver to southern California, I could pick out the Kahan songs.

I kept asking Noah to play more, though I didn’t start paying close attention to the lyrics until early this year when I discovered Kahan’s concert tour included a stop in Edmonton, where I live. That’s what prompted me to finally figure out the Spotify account Noah signed me up for last spring. It’s also when I discovered how many of Kahan’s songs are about his mental health struggles.

Kahan is 11 months older than Noah. Like Kahan, Noah has had mental health struggles: six years ago, he was suicidal and spent three months in a psychiatric hospital. I had always thought losing my father to suicide at 13 was the worst thing that ever happened to me but nothing has been worse (and I pray nothing will be) than having my kind, smart, funny, loving son want to die.

Having a loved one in a psychiatric hospital can destroy a family. The experience certainly threatened ours. While Noah was in the hospital receiving treatment that enabled him to heal, my husband, daughter, and I signed ourselves up for family therapy: we needed a mediator because we kept taking out our fear and anger on each other.  

Ultimately, Noah’s hospitalization brought our family closer. I believe it also made us more attuned to the grief and pain of others. And that brings me back to the concert. By the time I suggested to Noah that we get tickets, the show was sold out and what tickets were available were out of our price range. But the more I listened to Kahan’s songs, the more determined I was to see him perform.

A friend of mine has tickets to every event at Rogers Place, the concert venue. At lunch a week before the show, I asked if she was going. No, she said, but her son was. Then she told me about some of the other concerts he was planning to see. I’d never heard of the bands, all of which sounded more like thrash-metal than sensitive up-tempo folk.

“Does he even like Noah Kahan?” I asked.

Five days before the concert, she texted to say I could have the tickets. That’s when I remembered that Noah wasn’t even going to be in town—he was flying across the country to see relatives and friends—including a friend he made in the hospital.

“It’s okay, Mom,” he said. “Go with Dad. Have fun.”

For the next few days I scrolled through Spotify in search of Kahan music I hadn’t heard. The day before the show, I stumbled across Call Your Mom, a haunting song from the point of view of a young person trying to help a suicidal friend stay alive.

When Noah was in the hospital, his two closest friends became a crucial lifeline for our family. They told my husband and me things Noah wouldn’t tell us—things he wasn’t telling his psychiatrist, either. They told us not to let him come home from the hospital because he was still planning to kill himself. They could have written Call Your Mom.

The concert more than lived up to my expectations. When Kahan launched into All My Love, one of his typically upbeat songs about a downbeat topic (the dissolution of his parents’ marriage), I started singing along. The millennials directly in front of us started hopping up and down, screaming the lyrics. Maybe that’s what compelled me to turn around. About five rows behind us and on the other side of the aisle, a woman a little older than the screamers caught my eye. We were both singing along with Kahan, but suddenly we began singing to each other, raising our fists during the chorus, connecting in a way I never had with a stranger at a concert. After a few verses, though, she turned to the guy next to her and began talking, and I once again faced the front. It had been a fun few minutes, but maybe she thought I was a creepy weirdo and was afraid to make further eye contact.

A few minutes after that, my husband and I decided to stand in the front of our section to get away from the screamers. We were down in the front when Kahan played Call Your Mom. When the concert began winding down, we moved again, this time to the back of the section, to be closer to the exit.

Halfway up the stairs, someone stepped into the aisle, blocking my way. It was the woman with whom I’d been singing.

She placed her hands on my shoulders, ensuring that I was facing her and could hear her over the sound of the crowd singing all around us.

“My mom passed away in August,” she said, tears welling up. “When you started singing with me, it made me think of her.”

Instinctively, I hugged her, hard, tight, the way I like someone to hold me when I’m sad. And she didn’t let go. She clung to me, and then she broke down. I could feel her sobbing and shaking against me.

“I told my fiancé, if she was alive, she would have been here with me,” she cried. “And I saw you, and you look like her. You remind me of her.”

We stood like that for I don’t know how long, her clinging to me, a mother who understands grief. And next to us was my husband, whose own mother died six weeks ago. And all around us, thousands of people were singing in unison with a young man who is not only making it okay to be open about anxiety and depression and suicide and grief and loss, he’s making it catchy.

So many of Kahan’s lyrics are worth sharing, but this one, which he wrote with Todd Sherman Clark in Call Your Mom, really resonates with me: “Don’t let this darkness fool you. All lights turned off can be turned on.”

There were so many times six years ago, when Noah was in the hospital, that I believed the darkness, when I was certain he couldn’t be helped, that we were going to lose him the way I lost my father.

And yet here I was, on a Friday night, a Shabbat, not in synagogue (the way I once spent every Friday) but having a different kind of spiritual experience, listening to music I found because my son is alive and healthy. And because he is alive and healthy, I was in the right place at the right time to give comfort to someone else who needed it.

That, my friends, is what I believe life is all about. Pay attention to the signs.

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