Young Blood

The earliest-feeling of the five in spirit if not in recording date, this song has the quality of someone singing about youth from inside it — not retrospective sentimentality but live-wire present tense, the anxiety and exhilaration of not yet knowing how things will resolve. The arrangement is fuller here, drums more prominent, an almost anthemic momentum to the chorus that lifts the track into something approaching arena-folk, though Kahan's particular rawness keeps it from ever feeling polished into insincerity. The tempo is brisk without being rushed, and there's an infectious physical quality to the rhythm that connects it to the long tradition of songs about young bodies in motion, summer nights, the feeling that something is beginning. The vocal delivery matches the energy — looser, more extroverted than his quieter work, less controlled and more alive to the moment. Lyrically the territory is the charged uncertainty of early adulthood: who you might become, who you're becoming in relationship to other people, the specific fear-excitement of uncharted time. It carries echoes of the Vermont-indie scene that produced Kahan but also points outward toward something more broadly American — Springsteen's romanticism with less mythology, more earnest. Reach for this at the beginning of something, or when you need to remember what the beginning felt like.