Stick Season, released a year ago, has seen a revival of folk/country music. It’s gripping chorus the backtrack to many viral TikTok posts. But is this all we are listening for?

Around this time of year we reflect, we revisit the walls that broke our hearts and the faces that tried to fix them. We flick through photos to recreate pleasant days and find lost memories. We dream the days away and find that we would rather rest our head in this other worldly plain. There will always be blurred faces in the backs of our mind, always be those nights when you catch those wandering eyes and you question what if it had been more than kiss? What could be worse than this? Falling in love just to feel like you’ve missed. Something you didn’t have, something you didn’t lose, you learn to live with the decisions you choose.

Our family figurines, just people in positions, we have placed them in to protect us from reality. The lives we lost because of something we found out, everything you’re doing all for someone else. People change because they have to, changed minds and changed lives we can live in our memories but we will not survive. There are the miracles of life and the joys of Christmas and summer but there is also the ‘season of the sticks’ a miserable time of year where life drags out the dirt you have tried to bury.

This song is evocative of campfire nights, of some distant life I am yet to have experienced but I am only really inspired by it’s chorus. There is talent and there is poetry but it feels lost to the rushed tempo, a racing mind too scared to settle on the thoughts that make it run, so it is clever in that sense but it feels undone, taking away the motional impact that a broken heart has, there is no time to settle with the pain, there is just the feeling of running away.

However, I am impressed and amused by the rhyming of sticks with exist and the verse:

‘ So I thought that if I piled something good on all my bad
That I could cancel out the darkness I inherited from dad
No and I’m no longer funny but I miss the way you laugh’

Covered by Olivia Rodrigo on BBC Radio One’s Live Lounge this song has truly got people talking, crying into the cuffs of their sleeves, singing along on drives through the country back to see old friends and family. There is so much pain in poetry but it can be beautifully to listen to as it unites us, an audible force in the face of adversity.

Emotionally intricate but rushed through, maybe we need to be braver and spend a little more time in the ‘Season of the Sticks’ to truly appreciate the warmth of summer.