Name: The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping
Director: Francis Lawrence
Released: 2026-11-20T00:00:00+00:00

The easy way to hear Noah Kahan’s “Draw You Out” is the way the first wave of coverage heard it: a folk-pop songwriter walks into the Hunger Games and comes out swinging. Billboard called him “ready for battle” and labelled its chosen lyric “fighting words.” Kahan, asked about the song’s mood by the same magazine, described something else: “This is not the scene where they’re all like, fighting back.”

That line is the key to the single. Kahan did not write the arena. He wrote what the arena leaves behind, for a character whose future every Hunger Games fan already knows: Haymitch Abernathy, the teenage tribute of Sunrise on the Reaping, who grows into the mentor Woody Harrelson played opposite Katniss and Peeta in the original films.

A verse written from inside Haymitch

Kahan has been clear about his source. In a social post before the release, quoted by Rolling Stone, he said he was already “totally connected and inspired by the tragic yet hopeful story of Haymitch and Lenore Dove,” Haymitch’s girlfriend in the story, and that he set out to write about “the purpose, grief and perseverance through pain that they exemplify.”

The verse Billboard quotes shows how literally he took that brief: “I was born with someone else’s face / A coward’s anger and a fighter’s rage / I wait around for them to take my place / And say love you’re free now.” Read as a battle cry, those are fighting words. Read beside the mentor Haymitch becomes, the line about waiting for someone “to take my place” lands heavier: a survivor waiting for permission to stop.

The chorus, quoted by Rolling Stone, moves from the Games to the aftermath: “I carry you on with me / I promised you I would, and I do / And I float around / Show up unannounced in the places that you knew.” It is a song about keeping a promise to someone who is no longer in the room. Kahan calls it what it is: “It is sad, but you’re not really coming to me if you’re looking for heartwarming.” Whatever lift the track has, he told Billboard, comes from the production, because “if you really listen,” he is “still saying sad stuff. It just happens to have a cool beat behind it.”

Where the Kahan catalogue takes over

There is a fair objection here, and it sits in that same chorus. Strip the film away and “I carry you on with me” could close a Noah Kahan album. The track reunites him with Aaron Dessner, who co-wrote and co-produced it and who was his collaborator on the Billboard 200 No. 1 album The Great Divide and its deluxe edition, The Last of the Bugs. Billboard hears the “dramatic, multi-tracked vocals” that carried him to the top tier with “Stick Season.”

Kahan does not pretend otherwise. “I want there to be part of me in it, as a way to find parts of me in part of this character,” he told Billboard, adding that he “didn’t feel like I was sacrificing either one.” The verse belongs to Haymitch. The chorus belongs to both of them, and that is the bet: that a songwriter who built his audience on naming grief out loud is the right voice for the one Hunger Games hero whose story is mostly aftermath.

The lineage, and the album it has to set up

The company is heavy. Hunger Games soundtracks have given lead songs to Taylor Swift, Lorde, Coldplay and Olivia Rodrigo, and Rolling Stone points to the Grammy-winning “Safe & Sound” by Swift with The Civil Wars and to Rodrigo’s “Can’t Catch Me Now” from The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes. Kahan’s reaction to that list: “That sounds like my playlist on my phone.” His real worry, he said, was “doing justice to a bunch of people that have a really deep, intimate connection with these characters and these stories.”

For now, “Draw You Out” also carries the soundtrack alone. The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping (The Album) is executive produced by Dave Cobb, known for his work with Chris Stapleton and Sturgill Simpson, and brings together 29 cross-genre artists according to MCA, yet Billboard reports that Kahan is the only one confirmed so far. Suzanne Collins wrote the novel; Kahan said matching “what the director sees in these characters, what Suzanne Collins wrote these characters for” was “a big task, but a really fun challenge.”

The single arrived on October 2. The album, which places it at track 27, is due November 13, one week before Francis Lawrence’s film opens in theaters on November 20 through Lionsgate. Joseph Zada plays the 16-year-old Haymitch at the 50th Hunger Games, a Quarter Quell that sends twice the usual number of tributes from each district, with Whitney Peak as Lenore Dove and Ralph Fiennes back as President Snow. James Newton Howard returns to score the film.

Billboard heard fighting words; the man who wrote them says the fight is not the scene. Every artist still to be named on this soundtrack now has to decide which of those two songs they are answering.

Tags: Noah Kahan, Aaron Dessner, soundtracks, Haymitch Abernathy, The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping