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.”

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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 difference between simply surviving and truly living. And both wanted to feel like it was not only OK to leave, but that sometimes it’s necessary. And when it is, that people will understand.

“I think what’s great about songwriting is you can take a simple concept and make it an anthem,” he says. “I think a lot of people want to leave and have a hard time accepting they want to leave … but some people got to go.”

I had to. And when I did in 1999, “Wide Open Spaces” by The Chicks was the soundtrack for a pilgrimage that took me away from everything and everyone I knew. It seemed fitting for a girl moving from the Midwest to the West. Other strike-out-on-your-own anthems from the past include “Good Riddance” by Green Day and, more recently, “We Are Young” by fun.

Kahan tells USA TODAY the Green Day song was "the quintessential graduation song" when he was in middle school, and he performed The Head And The Heart's “Rivers and Roads” when he graduated high school.

"To think that there might be a generation of kids playing “You’re Gonna Go Far” at their graduation is an honor," said Kahan. "I hope the song brings the same optimism for the future to the families and friends and students themselves that those aforementioned songs brought to me.“

TikTok and Reels give new life to songs

Even in an unofficial anthem capacity, “You’re Gonna Go Far” is different from its predecessors. It’s alive in an era of TikTok, Instagram and Reddit. It’s being used to give rhythm and context to photos and milestones across social media. It’s giving people a collective space to lament the bittersweet feeling of leaving – confessing that they’re “ugly crying on the couch” and admitting that the song hits them “like a train” even years after moving away. 

It shares both sides of emotions that come with leaving and letting go, the crux of emotions during graduation season. And, thanks to our ability to stream whatever we want whenever we want, it’s part of a musical thread that this generation of teens and young adults is able to share with this generation of parents.

It wasn’t always like that, Jonathan Perkins, the assistant chair of the songwriting department at Berklee College of Music, tells me. Parents didn’t always listen to or connect with the music their kids were listening to. My parents, for example, did not get down with Nirvana and Dr. Dre. The democratization of music, through streaming capabilities, has allowed kids to introduce parents to what moves them.

And sometimes, like with Noah Kahan, and even Taylor Swift and Harry Styles, parents get on board.

“We had much more dictated mediums of how we heard things. Radio had a strong influence,” Perkins says of Gen Xers who are now parents. “Now all the kids are sharing all kinds of stuff and I also think at the same time you’ve had a proliferation in a change of family psychology in the way parents get along with their kids. I think it only helps them connect with their kids.”

Parents and kids bonding over 'You're Gonna Go Far'

Many are connecting over this one song, in part because it somehow suggests empathy for both sides of the “leaving” coin.

For parents and for kids, the distinct imagery used in the song – “pack up your car, put a hand to your heart” and “we ain’t angry at you love, you’re the greatest thing we’ve lost” – gives pause to a season of life that has so much momentum, each milestone can feel like another rotation on an Indiana Jones-style boulder gaining speed as it rolls downhill. 

Michelle Cox hasn’t yet allowed herself to imagine the moment she drives away from Addy, her oldest, headed to college about four hours from home. But when she hears the song, introduced to her by her daughters, she needs a minute. It reminds her of her own desire to leave when she was a high school senior, graduating from the same high school her daughter is.

“There are moments where songs get you and this is definitely one of them,” Cox says. “I see a lot of similarities in my own feeling of needing to leave.”

The beauty of the song, as is the case with life and these complex moments of necessary growth, is that it moves the listener through a series of emotions. Its anticipatory tempo at the outset gives way to a more comforting pace as the lyrics propose pride and protection in the place of loss or anger. 

And isn’t that what we’re feeling as parents? Bittersweet pride? 

Parents share in kids' success

Ritta Fagain does. Her oldest graduated high school in 2020, when the COVID-era ceremony was set up as a drive-thru. Her youngest son will graduate this spring and attend school about two hours away, which means she’ll be an official empty nester.

Milestones this school year have stirred emotions. And she has had to explain to him that the day he leaves it may seem like she is crying and hoping he will stay, but she is actually crying and pushing him on his way. 

“We’ve not only earned these emotions, but we’re mourning the end of an era. It was a time in life that was fast and it was slow. It’s every cliche in the book coming true,” she says. “What we’re mourning is this time being over, not just that we miss our kids. And the sadness of it is wonderful because it means it was wonderful.”

Amy Wolff can relate. As she’s preparing for her youngest to graduate and attend college, and as an admittedly obsessed Noah Kahan fan, this song gains more meaning with each passing day. 

“Music in general allows you to release some of that energy and emotion that you stifle,” she says. “I don’t want her to feel bad that she is causing this emotion. She’s exactly where she should be and she is going to set the world on fire and I can’t wait to be a witness to that. I’m so proud of her.”

Pride isn’t reserved exclusively for the graduate. Michael Klinkner, a Phoenix-based licensed clinical social worker, said many times the emotions that come with graduation and an impending empty-nest period are associated with joint achievement.

Parents and kids have reached this milestone together, he says. When I think back to what my daughter and I have navigated together, how we’ve had to grow alongside each other through some pretty gnarly challenges, graduation very much ties a beautiful bow around the emotional muscles we’ve sprouted and the bond we’ve formed. 

I feel comfortable saying we’ve hit our stride. And we got there by wading through and holding each other up through some incredibly sticky family court quicksand that could have swallowed us. For others, the pandemic tripped them or teenage years created a divide. 

“All of the things that were a struggle are now part of this achievement,” Klinkner says. “We pulled this off together. I’ve earned (the right) to get to be sad about this. I’ve been on this road. You’ve done it, but I’ve been pushing and pulling and sometimes holding your hand and using a cattle prod, but I get to have all these emotions.”

Couple that sense of achievement with the loss of routine, the turning of a page and the realization – for those who are sending their youngest off to school – that life with a spouse or alone returns to what it was before children existed, and it’s natural to feel uneasy, if nostalgic, for what we’ve known for nearly two decades.

“It’s the same exact feeling now as when you had a newborn,” Klinkner says, harkening to that terrifying unfamiliarity. “Someone will probably poop their pants, but it’s OK. You’ll figure it out. You get to be sad. You get to be nervous. You don’t get to freak out and show them you think they’re ill-equipped. They don’t get to know you’re afraid of that.”

Noah Kahan's song as a journey

So that’s the official line. And, according to Simon, that was the vibe for the song. It needed to somehow weave together the anxieties of someone leaving with the assurance that person needs from the people sending them off. It needed to hold promise. It needed to be comforting. 

Simon said “You’re Gonna Go Far” was the most challenging one on the album, so challenging it had to be rerecorded four times. The energy had to be just right. Because in the end, they were singing it to themselves, in the way some people give advice that they themselves are meant to take.

To me, it is apropos that a song about a milestone in life that comes with a complex, mixed-bag of difficult-to-describe emotions was itself challenging to master. The song itself was a journey.

“That song in particular, we never knew why it resonated with so many people on so many levels. It just kept doing so well. It’s got to be this thing about wishing you well. I think this whole time we’ve been wishing ourselves well,” Simon said. “I love that song because it starts melancholy and ends joyful. We’re watching a butterfly. It should be full of hope and love and joy. You’re getting your sea legs and then you’re riding off into the sunset.”

As a parent, that hits, doesn’t it? Wishing someone well is the only way to wish them. Especially when they’re your kid, starting their life. They are butterflies. You just hope they’re ready to navigate the inevitable headwinds. 

And if mine ever needs a breather, to rest her wings, I’ll “be here forever.”