When I first heard the song, my youngest daughter had warned me as we were driving to school that it made her friend’s mom cry.
After hearing just a few bars, my throat clenched to a point where words weren’t possible without the threat of a deluge of tears. Noah Kahan’s “You’re Gonna Go Far” did that to me, on a weekday morning, in my pajama pants, while running carpool for my eighth grader.
Tucked inside the song’s lyrics is a vivid reflection of my oldest daughter, a senior in high school, preparing not only for graduation but for a new chapter that will take her away from home. Away from me. And through my speakers, one of the most popular indie-folk singer-songwriters was singing about this transition and the complicated emotions that come with it, to me.
Or, so it felt.
How a song becomes your anthem or soundtrack
“I had no idea. I didn’t even think about it that way. That’s so exciting,” Gabe Simon, who wrote and produced the Stick Season album with Kahan, says from his backyard in Nashville, Tennessee. “It’s so powerful that a song can do that. That you have a visceral experience in your body with your child heading off.”
Need a break? Play the USA TODAY Daily Crossword Puzzle.
Simon and Kahan were thinking about their own moments of leaving as they wrote the song, which was rereleased this year with a Brandi Carlile feature that injects even more emotion. Both men are from small towns where people didn’t leave. Both understood the…
