Songfacts®:

• In "Homesick," Noah Kahan wrestles with a twisted irony. The roots that bind him to his Strafford, Vermont, hometown have morphed into barbed wire, the familiar streets a suffocating maze. The folk-rock ballad drips with yearning, not for distant shores, but for the liberating breeze of escape from a place that once cradled him. It's homesickness redefined, a longing for what lies beyond the picket fences and childhood ghosts.
• Kahan wrote "Homesick" himself and co-produced it with his regular collaborator, Gabe Simon. He recorded it for his third album, Stick Season.
• Kahan teamed up with English singer-songwriter Sam Fender for a new version of "Homesick," which he released on January 19, 2024. The Vermont singer-songwriter is a fan of Fender's music; "Seventeen Going Under" was the first song he listened to when he started working on Stick Season. "Homesick" was a result of listening to Fender's honest portrayal of his hometown.
  
  "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," said Kahan. "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."
  
  He added: "This song was the final push for me to start writing about my own experiences."
• Fender is from North Shields, a former shipbuilding town near the city of Newcastle in North East England. When Kahan was on tour in the UK, he met up with Fender and saw the places that influenced his songs.
  
  "We hit the Lowlights Tavern for a swift Guinness and walked in the bitter cold of the seafront," said Kahan. "Chatting with him about things in both of our pasts made me realize how universal 'Homesick' is. We've all been that kid."
• Fender liked the original "Homesick" because it was "a lush song." He agreed to work with Kahan after they had a phone conversation and "immediately hit it off."
  
  He said their duet version is about "two young people who want to leave their hometowns and talk to each other across the ocean."
• Fender did his parts for the song in North Shields, "literally overlooking the 'static cranes' that I mention in my verse; it's a stone's throw from the estate in which the riots took place in the early '90s."
  
  "It made me proud of my hometown, and my people," he said. "The Geordies are a hilarious bunch, resilient and impermeable to hard times and hard drinking; my hometown is a constant source of inspiration."