While the digital revolution, well, evolved, Norwich resident Nora Jacobson still preferred to show her movies to – and to attend other filmmakers’ works with – a bunch of other people in a theater.

Shoulder to shoulder.

Knee to knee.

Face to face.

“People don’t watch as carefully, I think, if they’re watching on a device, by themselves, especially at home,” Jacobson says. “They’re distracted by the phone or texts. You don’t get that same sense of people zeroing in on your film, especially if you make films that are complex, like I do.”

Jacobson’s complicated fictional tales range from 1998’s My Mother’s Early Lovers and 2004’s Nothing Like Dreaming to 2016’s The Hanji Box (look up these titles on www.imdb.com), the latter of which she screened at the White River Indie Film Festival in 2017.

Jacobson also planned to show an early version of her work-in-progress documentary about poet Ruth Stone to a live audience during the 2020 festival in White River last spring, the better to elicit feedback.

Then the coronavirus pandemic forced White River Indie Film to cancel its 16th annual festival, most of which would have screened at the Briggs Opera House.

It didn’t end there, however. The WRIF board brainstormed ways to stay on the radar of the Upper Valley’s devotees of film, resolving to use virtual technology to share and encourage discussion about as many movies as possible.

“We were all ready to do programs for the May festival when the quarantines started, but we didn’t want to leave it there,” Plainfield filmmaker, Upper Valley native and WRIF board president Samantha Davidson Green recalls. “The board made a commitment to do everything in our power to connect people to film.”

That effort began with WRIF joining the Sierra Club of the Upper Valley to live-stream a program celebrating the 50th anniversary of Earth Day in April.

And in May, some 50 people signed up for the discussion of Jacobson’s Stone documentary – far more than she expects would have come to the theater in person.

“It was incredibly helpful for me,” Jacobson said of the discussion of her work in progress, now in the editing stages. “I received a lot of good feedback from people. I could ask questions of the audience and they could answer.”

WRIF also helped Jacobson, a co-founder and former board president of the group, continue the part of her Freedom & Unity project closest to her heart: Encouraging young filmmakers around Vermont to pursue passion projects of their own, with an emphasis on social justice.

While fewer Vermonters submitted films than in years past,  among the 56 who did was Norwich’s  young Ezra McGinley-Smith, whose documentary short about the Willing Hands program fighting food insecurity won the middle-school division’s social justice award.

“It was hard getting as many to submit this year because so many young people, especially, had been thrown into isolation,” Jacobson said. “The silver lining was that during the awards ceremony, which we did on Zoom, many more kids were able to participate in the discussion after the screenings. In the past, we would have to get them to come to the theater. This way, we had a much higher attendance from the young people. The kids tend to be rather shy when they’re standing on the stage. But in the safety of their homes, they were more open.”

Among the films those audiences got to discuss was Norwich teenager

Ezra McGinley-Smith’s documentary short called Willing Hands – a 7½-minute documentary about how the Norwich-based nonprofit, which collects surplus and donated food that otherwise would go to waste, focused on getting that food to Upper Valley residents who lost jobs and income during the COVID crisis. The film in 2020 won the middle-school division’s social-justice award from Jacobson’s Freedom & Unity program, which grew out of the series of movies about Vermont.

“When it won,” he told the Norwich Times last fall, “I was like, ‘Wow: there’s potential for this!’”

McGinley-Smith, a polymath of a creative, said at the time that he didn’t think too much about filmmaking until he attended the WRIF festival a few years ago.

“I can’t remember exactly when, but I was still at Marion Cross School,” said McGinley-Smith, now an eighth-grader at Richmond Middle School in Hanover. “I got really inspired by what I saw.”

Not long after arriving at Dartmouth College to teach film in 2010, Jodie Mack also found inspiration in WRIF’s promotion of local moviemaking, and in Jacobson’s commitment to that goal.

“In 2016, my ‘Curating and Microcinema’ course at Dartmouth created a program for WRIF – ‘Dames and Gutters’ – short animated films showcasing the representation of female comic characters (that featured) contemporary and historical works… (and) celebrated the shared trajectories of comics and animation alongside various female tropes promoted throughout the years” at the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River. 

And in 2019, Mack screened her first feature film at WRIF at Northern Stage in White River Junction.

“It was one of the first times I’d ever shared my work locally outside of Dartmouth,” she says. “The experience of sharing my films with my neighbors was a tremendous inspiration.”

Inspiration enough to join Davidson, CATV’s Chico Eastridge, Tunbridge musician and multimedia artist Quinn Thomashow and other Upper Valley creative in putting together a Light River Junction festival of experimental film screenings at outdoor venues around downtown White River in December.

“I was so thrilled at the turnout and for the love and care behind the event, both from the organizers and the attendees,” Mack says. “With WRIF, we have a gem – an opportunity for people to come together in the name of cinema, to seek pleasure and challenge from the screen as a community.”

The Light River Junction festival culminated a 2020 that could have been an artistic desert.

Instead, after its spring and summer programs, WRIF hosted a fall series of virtual discussions leading up to the November election, with an emphasis on race and voter suppression, also exceeded the organizers’ expectations. With panelists ranging from Vermont congressman Peter Welch to Kiah Morris, the Black state representative from Bennington County who left the Vermont legislature after months of harassment, “we ended up with fabulous participation because we didn’t have any geographical bounds,” Davidson Green says. “We really felt it was an urgent time, to offer opportunities to connect.”

The warm, relatively dry summer of 2020 gave a variety of area arts groups a brief opportunity to reconnect us with live performance – some enlightening, some entertaining, many serving both purposes.

At Lyman Point Park in White River, the Hartford recreation department staged several concerts by Americana musicians.

In Woodstock, Pentangle Arts executive director Alita Paine Wilson recruited Vermont-based performers, including Hartland singer-songwriter Jay Nash and Pomfret native Tristan Henderson’s band Pete’s Posse, for a short-but-sweet series of Music by the River concerts behind the North Universalist Chapel.

Meanwhile, Barnard’s BarnArts Center for the Arts recruited area actors to perform a theatrical adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’s Vermont-based dystopian novel, It Can’t Happen Here, during a late-summer, well, barnstorming tour of town greens and parks around central Vermont. My wife Goodie and I saw the production, a timely as well as entertaining reminder of the approaching election, at Woodstock’s East End Park, along with at least 100 socially-distanced spectators in the hillside bleachers – a blessed break in the drought of live performance.

Before long, of course, came the shortening and the chilling of the days, and the yet another darkening of the performing-arts world as we knew it. Sure, it helps to fill some of the void, if one has broadband, to gain access to live-streaming of programs and movies from sources ranging from White River’s JAG Productions and Dartmouth College’s Hopkins Center, to the Billings Farm and Museum’s Woodstock Vermont Film and the Chandler Center for the Arts in Randolph.

As for 2021? Hold the phone.

“We don’t anticipate an old-fashioned festival until 2022,” Davidson Green said. “We’re looking right now at doing a hybrid of outdoors and streaming this spring, along the lines of the Light River Junction concept.

“The goal, long-term, is to continue nurturing the full cycle, with the activist angle that has been a big part of our identity.

“There’s a lot of good will right now.”

If this keeps up, the world will know Norwich as much for the creative young entrepreneurs that it grows (or should we say entrepreneurial young creatives?) as for the Olympic athletes it cultivates. Most visibly these days, 22-year-old Jake Laser is building a big following on YouTube for his videos of the inventions he’s been churning out since early adolescence. “I always had the passion for building stuff,” says the 2015 graduate of Hanover High School. “This is what it’s manifested into so far. I don’t think this is the final step.”

Under the guidance of budding music producer and fellow college undergraduate Phin Choukas, Hans Williams is taking the first tentative steps toward a career in music, already reaching thousands of listeners on platforms like Spotify for the songs he’s writing and singing and recording. “I’m slowly learning how to promote myself,” Williams says. “There’s so much that I don’t know, that I still need to learn.”

And here comes 13-year-old Ezra McGinley-Smith, whom – depending, on the time of year, the day of the week, and the hour of the day – you might find shooting a TV ad or an award-winning movie, or crafting a website for an Upper Valley business, or diving for sunken treasure in Upper Valley waterways, or trapping skunks. “I like to stay busy,” says McGinley-Smith, an eighth-grader at Richmond Middle School in Hanover.

So do Laser, Williams, and Choukas… to the extent that the coronavirus allows these days.

Jake Laser

Before relocating to Los Angeles in September, Laser self-isolated over the spring and summer at home in Norwich. And after remotely finishing his undergraduate degree in physics from Saint Lawrence University, he retreated full-time into his workshop in the family basement to tinker with and test a parade of inventions, all the while documenting the processes for his JLaservideo pages on Instagram and YouTube (www.youtube.com/user/JLaservideo).

Near summer’s end, Laser flew an elaborate hoverboard – inspired in part by the craft on which the comic-strip movie villain Green Goblin avoids ground traffic – over Storrs Pond and Fullington Field in Hanover.

And thanks to that video and several that he released through the third week of November, his roster of YouTube subscribers grew to 1.3 million. “With the YouTube income,” Laser says, “I’ve been able to pay off all my college loans.”

In Los Angeles, he’s working on a range of projects with a business partner in a workshop and studio that so far appears to be a safe bubble of creativity. “It’s one of the rare industries that’s actually upticking a little right now,” Laser said. “It’s been decent.”

Hans Williams

Hans Williams figured he was maintaining a decent pace himself, until contracting Covid-19 almost as soon as he’d returned to New Orleans for his sophomore year at Tulane University. “I got it the first day of classes, while I was working on the video to go with the song Phin and I recorded over the summer,” says Williams who is majoring in marketing with a minor in music production. “I had to quarantine for a couple of weeks, which kind of set me back. “And I guess I’m going to have to quarantine when I come back to Norwich over the holidays, so Phin and I will have to wait before we can start working on our next project.”

Good thing, then, that the former ice-hockey teammates – “since Mites and Squirts up through high school,” Williams says – devoted an intense couple of weeks finetuning Williams’ latest song, Body on My Shoulders, in the Choukas family’s Dreaded Zig Zag, the studio on Kerwin Hill. “He showed me that song in late July or early August,” says Choukas. “We put it together pretty quickly. He took a while to find the right words. We had a really good time making it before we went our separate ways.”

In Choukas’ case, “separate” meant transporting his recording equipment to California, where he is self-isolating in a small bubble of friends. Between recording projects, he’s remotely continuing his undergraduate studies at Middlebury College where he’s a junior.

Choukas also is using this time to figure out what he wants to do for a living after college. While he’s caught the attention of the ever-evolving music industry for his production wizardry (www.norwichtimes.com/music-comes-home) for the likes of Strafford-native singer-songwriter Noah Kahan, he confesses “I still don’t know if it’s what I want to do professionally. “I’ve been so fortunate to work with really talented vocalists and musicians, but up until now it’s been more about doing it for friends. It’s kind of a therapeutic experience. A relief and an escape.”

Those rewards motivated Williams to ‘midwife’ and record Body on My Shoulders at least as much as any commercial ones that might or might not follow. Back in Norwich, after Tulane sent everyone home for the spring and summer to avoid the coronavirus, he started assembling the song in response to the suicide of a fellow Tulane freshman in a neighboring dormitory suite in 2019. “Being in virtual quarantine over the summer really helped me write it,” Williams says. “And having Phin there for every step, the way he was on my first record (Guardian, released the spring of his junior year at Hanover High) made such a difference. He’s the one who’s hearing all the takes, and has the best ear on all of it.”

According to the online music site Spotify, more than 2,000 people were following the songs that Williams and Choukas were sharing as of Thanksgiving, and more than 75,000 a month were listening. “I’m not too worried yet that some big label will sweep me off my feet,” Williams hastens to add. “I still have a lot to learn. There have been people who came and hit me with ideas for weird deals, things I don’t want to sign. I didn’t think too much about that coming from Norwich.”

Ezra McGinley-Smith

While – like his father, a dermatologist by trade – Ezra McGinley-Smith enjoyed still photography, he didn’t think too much about filmmaking until he attended the White River Indie Film Festival in White River Junction a few years ago. “I can’t remember exactly when, but I was still at Marion Cross School,” McGinley-Smith recalls. “I got really inspired by what I saw.”

That inspiration led first to testing his skills with sports-action films, particularly skiing, à la documentarian Warren Miller. Then, during the early weeks of the pandemic, with the free time gained after schools went to remote learning, he shot Willing Hands – a 7½-minute documentary about how the Norwich-based nonprofit, which collects surplus and donated food that otherwise would go to waste, focused on getting that food to Upper Valley residents who lost jobs and income during the Covid crisis. The film recently won the middle-school division’s social-justice award from the Freedom & Unity program, led by Norwich movie director Nora Jacobson. “When it won,” he remembers, “I was like, ‘Wow: there’s potential for this!’”

Indeed, the acclaim led to commissions to shoot commercials for products ranging from electric tea-kettles to Hershey’s chocolate and a Segway scooter. “Having the digital technology that’s available now has really helped,” McGinley-Smith says. “At least while I’m starting out, the modern way seems the most practical way to go, though at some point I want to try the old-fashioned way, to see what they were doing back then.”

One of those more old-fashioned ways he earns walking-around money, is trapping skunks for neighbors, friends, and acquaintances. And at some point, McGinley-Smith might start charging for his free dives into area lakes, ponds, and rivers to retrieve items lost by fishermen, golfers, and other outdoors persons.

“So far it’s been for fun, for the challenge,” he says. “It’s crazy what you find down there that you’re not even looking for: An old phone from a pay phone; a bicycle wheel; an iPhone; many, many, many pairs of sunglasses.”

Jake Laser sums up the same spirit all three of these creatives share. He expects to follow his curiosity and sense of adventure wherever they lead him, commercially viable/viral or no. “I’m always excited for what comes next,” he concludes. “I try to be on the edge, push myself whenever I can.”

You say you want a Revels solution for Christmas? In the middle of the coronavirus pandemic? This season, thanks to some creative scrambling on the part of the leaders and the rank-and-file performers of Revels North – many of them from Norwich – you’ll find it online or on your TV screen.

In place of what would have been the Upper Valley’s 45th consecutive live yuletide pageant celebrating the Winter Solstice in song and dance, Revels North last spring commissioned All Shall Be Well Again – a 17-minute animated film that Norwich resident and Revels executive director Brian Cook describes as “just lovely to behold … very, very true to the Revels spirit, with a respect for the traditional style.”

And while the organization will miss its main source of revenue for its programs – ticket sales to live shows at the Lebanon Opera House – Revels is offering the movie for free, with a particular nod to members of the Upper Valley community who might be struggling financially and otherwise during the pandemic, Cook adds. “It is a message of hope that dovetails with our message, our mission, of bringing light to the darkest time of the year,” he says. “People right now are experiencing the darkness in a very real way.”

As much in his role as a psychiatrist as in his mind-set as a member of the Revels North board and a regular performer in the pageant, Norwich resident John Severinghaus welcomes this solution. “I said at our meetings that whatever we do is going to be better than doing nothing,” says Severinghaus, who lent his voice to the animated character of Father Christmas. “Having Revels go completely dark for a whole year was just not an option. The whole point of Revels is that the sun is going to come back. “Let’s do what we can to help it along.”

The trick, he adds, was to make it “fun and creative and different.” And doing a hybrid digital version of the full, live extravaganza was not going to cut it. “20 to 25 people in Zoom, I’m not sure how you’d do it,” Severinghaus says. “To keep time and keep pitch, stitching it together was not practical. It could be done, but even that… Come on: that’s not going to be a real show.”

During the last “real” show, in December of 2019 at the opera house, Meriden, N.H. resident Sam Clifton was, well, reveling in the chance to play a lead role in his debut at the Christmas Revels.

And between his own moments in the spotlight, the 2015 graduate of Lebanon High School was paying close attention to the Mummer’s Dance – the number that every year interrupts the main storyline of Revels North’s long-running celebration of the solstice. “While I was standing by as a spectator, I got an idea of the basic plot, and the importance of Saint George,” Clifton recalls. “You get to slay the giant and the dragon. You’re the hero. What more could you ask?”

What he learned by watching – and by listening – Clifton wove into his vocal performance as George in All Shall Be Well Again, to which he was invited to lend his voice. “I haven’t been able to do a lot of voice-acting work so far,” Clifton recalls. “I thought this would be a way to get a solid role onto my résumé.”

For the leadership of Revels North, the film emerged, last spring and summer, as a way to bridge the seasonal gap, and to keep Revels – which had to cancel its schedule of live music in the name of singer and listener safety – on the Upper Valley’s radar screen. “It wasn’t long before we began to realize that there was no way we could plan on live performances,” Cook says. “There was so much that we couldn’t anticipate.”

Instead, Cook, artistic director Nils Fredland and members of the Revels North board of directors started brainstorming, and quickly eliminated the idea of trying to do a hybrid live through online technology.

With input from Revels creatives, they found consensus around the idea of a short film, mixing animation and footage from previous years’ Revels, that area audiences could stream on their computers, and watch on Community Access Television (CATV). “It got us excited like nothing else was going to,” Cook recalls. “It was going to be the costliest option, in a year where maybe fundraising would be harder than usual because of the pandemic. But it really energized everybody, and seemed the most likely to get the audience excited.”

The Revels board bought into the plan from the outset. “Suddenly there was a spark,” board president and Lebanon resident Kim Rheinlander says. “People really embraced it. It was something so different, and something positive.”

With money from a variety of sources – including an anonymous donation of $10,000, $7,500 from a Vital Communities crowdsourcing campaign, a COVID-relief grant of $7,500 from the New Hampshire Council on the Arts, $5,000 from regular underwriter Mascoma Bank, on top of earlier contributions from regular individual benefactors – Revels North enlisted a Keene, NH-based nonprofit, The SALT Project, to weave animation around a storyline invoking Revels traditions. “A big part of our thinking was to seek out local artists, who need the work right now,” Cook says. “When the pandemic hit and lingered on, their livelihoods went up in smoke. We really wanted to support them as much as possible.”

Toward that end, Revels hired the No Strings Marionette Company in Randolph, VT, which had crafted puppets for the 2015 show at Dartmouth College’s Hopkins Center for the Arts. The troupe crafted and brought to life a puppet host for the film, in the persona of Jack Langstaff, the founder of the original Christmas Revels pageant in New York City, and who had established a comparable program in Cambridge, MA, in 1971.

Langstaff, who would have turned 100 this year, was the father of Carol Langstaff, the Sharon resident who founded Revels North in 1974. “When we saw the puppet,” Severinghaus says, “any of us who had privilege to know Jack, that was great to see.”

It worked as well for Rheinlander, who was captivated by the original Revels growing up in Cambridge in the 1970s, and who, after moving to the Upper Valley in the mid-1980s, joined Revels North and crossed paths with Langstaff in a variety of capacities, from backstage technical support to singing and acting with the ensemble.

Even after joining the board of directors, Rheinlander stayed active with the productions until 2019, when Revels moved the solstice pageant from the Hopkins Center’s Spaulding Auditorium to the Opera House. While the latter seats 800 people, to Spaulding’s 900, the 2019 show, drew a combined 3,000 people to five performances. Many of them, Rheinlander found while conducting exit interviews, had never seen the show at Dartmouth. “The people I talked with were so enthusiastic,” she says, “and we were very excited about having a second show there this year.”

With All Shall Be Well Again, Rheinlander hopes that Revels will keep things going, keep people enthused, knowing we’re still around.”

Revels North was scheduled to start streaming All Shall Be Well Again on November 20. The local cable station CATV was scheduled to start showing the film on Thanksgiving Day (November 26 at 2pm), with subsequent screenings on Giving Tuesday (December 1), and on December 21 (the winter solstice), Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and New Year’s Day. To learn more, visit revelsnorth.org.

In the 1943 movie, Lassie came home to Roddy McDowell. In the 1996 song that won Shawn Colvin the Grammy, Sonny came home with a mission… and a vengeance. In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic of 2020, Phin Choukas and Noah Kahan came home to the Upper Valley with time on their hands and with music on their minds.

So why – with Choukas’ sophomore year at Middlebury College and with Kahan’s rising career as a touring musician and on hold for the foreseeable future – did the childhood friends limit themselves to a single week of mud season to record Cape Elizabeth, an EP of five acoustic-folk songs?

Why, that is, aside from limiting the odds of one infecting the other in the Choukas family’s Dreaded Zig Zag studio on Kerwin Hill?

“We wanted to have a really raw sound, to build up the songs a little bit, but not take away from the rawness,” Choukas said recently from his Norwich home. “Just focus on Noah’s voice and the songwriting.”

That focus, along with the tight deadline, gave Kahan just the right context in which to play out songs and ideas he’d been struggling to bring to life between tours and recording on behalf of Republic Records, the label with which he’d signed out of Hanover High School in 2015.

“The time frame we were working with took away any chance of falling into overwhelming doubt about any given song, doing a lot of takes,” Kahan said from his home in Strafford. “I didn’t want to overthink or over-produce this record.”

Republic released the finished product on May 1 – barely two months after Kahan fled his professional home base, New York City, just ahead of the tsunami of Covid-19 infections. Picking up his younger brother Simon following what he calls “a week of almost total panic,” he drove north to shelter-in-place with their family.

Mostly for the sake of channeling their anxieties, the Kahans jammed with a song that Noah had written and set aside a few years earlier.

And now, This Troubled Mind took on new meaning, anchored by the following verse:

I worry for the sun, yes, I worry for the snow

I worry I’ll die young while I worry I’ll grow old

Oh, I worry for the time I spent worrying alone

It makes me sad

It takes me back

I break in half

Ah-ooh, I break in half.

Next thing the Kahan brothers knew, their mother had posted a video of them performing the song on the community Facebook page “The Quarantine Circus.” (facebook.com/groups/243263783376076/search/?query=Berkencamp&epa)

And shortly after the video hit Instagram, Republic commissioned the EP. For that, Kahan knew exactly whom he wanted to co-produce it – and where. “I’d recorded some of my very early stuff there with (Phin’s older brother) Nate, so it felt incredibly comfortable,” Kahan said. “Interesting to be back in that place. Felt really special.”

And Kahan knew that Phin had learned a few things from Nate, particularly how to make the most of the production software Ableton Live. In recent years, with Nate away pursuing a career in golf as well as post-doctoral studies in psychology, Phin has collaborated at the Dreaded Zig Zag with Norwich singer-songwriter Hans Williams, with Middlebury classmate Max Drazen, and with Ian Smith and Hunter Simpson of the band Loon.

“It takes a really long time to learn the tools,” Choukas said. “I see my computer as an instrument. There are so many aspects to the technology.”

On top of his technical skill, Kahan said, Choukas “has a knack for understanding what a piece needs to sound like. He’s great at hearing a song, knowing where the emotion needs to hit really hard.”

All this, two years out of Hanover High School. “Production is really all about your ear,” Choukas said. “The more reps you get, you learn to pick details out in songs. The more experience you get, you start to hear different things.”

And working with “incredibly talented people like Noah,” he added, “I’ve learned that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. That collaboration is what makes me most excited.”

In Kahan, he’s collaborating with an old friend who also is making a name for himself. Kahan’s EP Hurt Somebody, particularly a duet with Julia Michaels on the title track, drew wide acclaim in 2018. And before the coronavirus hit, he was preparing for a busy year of touring until the coronavirus postponed or cancelled them.

“Making music with Noah, to be so involved was such a privilege,” Choukas said. “He’s a great songwriter, and he knows how he wants to do things. We had a great work flow, super efficient.”

Much of the efficiency flowed out of necessity. “We were super careful,” Kahan said. “We both wore masks through every session. Phin was disinfecting his stuff, and I was disinfecting mine. I didn’t even use his bathroom.

“As well as we worked together – he knew what I wanted to do with the song before we went to the mic – there was always a little bit of tension in the room. “It was the strangest recording experience I ever had.”

As happy as they are with the finished product, they look back with mixed emotions, resisting the temptation to call the sheltering-at-home a blessing in disguise. “We’re so privileged, able to carry on our own lives” Choukas said. “I’m reluctant to say. At the same time, if not for this situation, this EP wouldn’t have happened. The music kind of fits the situation. “It’s something that can definitely be done in this world right now.” Kahan seconds those emotions.

“This project definitely provided a paradigm switch for me,” he said. “After five years of touring and writing and recording, I was feeling directionless. I didn’t feel like I was doing it for me anymore. One of the things that was reinforced for me by this experience is that things have changed. You can’t change them back.”

While Choukas is continuing to work with Kahan and other projects at the Dreaded Zig Zag during the pandemic break, he still foresees returning to his undergraduate studies in philosophy at Middlebury, as well as taking courses in sociology, education – and music appreciation.

“Music is what I’m most into, and the last two years, I’ve been more seriously into it,” he said. “At the same time, I find that having a good balance of interests helps with the music. Zoning in on one thing or the other, I can get kind of burnt out. When my class work gets kind of heavy, I need music as a bit of a break from the work.”

As much satisfaction as he’s finding in producing, Choukas will keep it as a side gig before deciding whether to go to law school after graduating from Middlebury.

And until further notice, he’ll continue to golf, mostly at Baker Hill Golf Club in Sunapee, between recording sessions until further notice.

“I’ve probably gotten out six or seven times since the weather started getting better,” Choukas said. “I’m definitely looking to keep my game sharp.”

To hear Noah Kahan’s EP Cape Elizabeth, visit https://open.spotify.com/album/7rAXvbNQSxnAnVl3taoMLj or www.republicrecords.com/artists/noah-kahan. David Corriveau is a freelance writer living in Lebanon.