The lead vocal is the standout part in this production for me. Not only is the performance effortlessly loose-limbed and authentic-sounding, helped by well-judged bouts of tuning waywardness (eg. during the drop-down at 3:01), but it also boasts a briliantly fluid and inventive lyric structure which makes a real feature out of creatively extending short phrases into longer ones.

Let’s start with the first phrase: “I grew up pretending sticks were little guns”. Now, a simple rhyme scheme might give a second line something like “I was happy eating sweets and sticky buns”, or an alternating rhyme pattern might continue it into a four-line stanza with “I’d be practising my aim on empty cans / I was happy eating sweets and sticky buns / I’d get sugar on my face and on my hands”. (Pure doggerel, I realise – I’m just demonstrating rhymes!) But what Kahan does here is much more sophisticated. He follows up that first phrase with “I would point them at my Dad and he’d get mad, cause God forbid I hurt someone” extending the melody of the first line by inserting a shorter rhyming couplet (“them at my Dad and he’d get mad”) midway through, thereby pushing the “[some]-one” that rhymes with “guns” a full two bars later than you’d expect. So not only has he introduced an unusual rhyme scheme, but he’s also created an unusual melodic phrase-extension into the bargain – in addition to rhyming the stressed syllable of “guns” with the naturally unstressed syllable of “[some]-one”, which is itself an ear-catching inversion of expectation. There’s a lot going on!

And this internal rhyming-couplet trick is reused elsewhere too. You can hear it twice in the third verse, for instance (“at the rattle of your keys, oh are you leaving” at 2:02 and “I’m left staring at the ceiling, counting reasons” at 2:12), and there’s even a kind of doubling down on the idea during the breakdown at 3:06, where two different couplets (“on-[ly]”/“known” and “now”/“how”) are shoe-horned in together to create the line “I’ll be only what you’ve known of me ’til now, oh how I hope you’re moving on”. You can hear another variation on this theme in the chorus lyric too, where the “red”/“bet” and “see”/“me” couplets help join together the longer melodic phrases “You’re putting money on red, I’m a sure bet at a losing streak” and “Cause it gets harder to see me the closer you try to look”. And I love how the the third verse (at 1:50) not only inserts the rhyming couplet “close-[ness]”/"[ex]-posed", but also an extended patch of sibilant alliteration “Have you ever stared directly at the sun? Have you ever shared some closeness, so exposed, to have it spit back by someone”.

One final cool variartion on this idea can be heard early in the song, where a few repeated syllables, rather than a rhyme, are used to create the structural scaffolding that supports the extension of the melodic line. In the first verse, for example, we get “I’d hurt anyone I could / Anyone who got too close, and anyone who wouldn’t look” (0:38), while in the second verse we get “Foot of ice across Vermont, and in that dark, and in that frost a heart was formed” (0:55).