Interview: Friendship

on seeing the beauty

dan’s playlist, written by him

The first time I saw a Friendship song performed live, it was by frontman Dan Wriggins at a solo set in a 50 cap room. Standing up alone under a spotlight, he spoke as much as sang the opening lines to “Clairvoyant”:

Sometimes a song, sometimes silence

Sometimes a friend gives me a little guidance

These kinds of profundities are scattered like jingle shells on a beach throughout Friendship’s discography, seemingly random and relentlessly astonishing. Nearly two years after that show, I meet Dan and the rest of the band at the Coffee Mill in Oakland the morning after they opened for Wednesday at the Fox. Dan is wearing a shirt that inexplicably states SAVE AMERICA FROM IOWA CITY and fastidiously mopping up the last few bites of his breakfast burrito with a fork and knife when I arrive.

The night before, he called down to the crowd, telling them that it was Friendship’s first time in Oakland. Then, in a tone almost bashful, “We love it.” He repeated the phrase with the same inflection in answer to my question of whether the band enjoys touring, as if sheepish to reveal that he’s excitable behind his hard gaze.

“At its best, touring is traveling,” bassist Jon Samuels adds, “It’s newness over and over again.” They tell me a story about their first time in Vegas, where they learned to play craps and picked up a habit of playing the game on a smartphone app for the rest of the tour. They condescend to describe the rules to me, Dan calling the opponent “lady luck” and explaining darksiding, which sounds like a good concept for a Friendship song.

The band tag teams the story of how Caveman Wakes Up standout “Resident Evil” came to be: years ago, Dan had written down the video game title as interesting wordplay around which to construct an entire world, as he often does in his bright and banal lyrics. During the pandemic, Jon got a VR headset and started playing Resident Evil, which he describes as, “Really, really scary. Too scary.”

“The title is strange, a mistranslation of something from the original Japanese,” Dan says, “It has all these other neat implications.” I ask if Jon is the shithead in the living room from the song, and Dan gets serious: “There’s no roommate. The evil resides within.”

The pandemic was a generative time for Friendship. Peter Gill (guitar) put out his first full-length record as 2nd Grade and Jon (bass) released an album of guitar music under JR Samuels. Michael Cormier-O’Leary (drums) had founded Real Life Records on the side in 2019; Dan remembers, “Mike lost his job and he got double unemployment. It was like a UBI, and his business flourished, his creative output multiplied.”

Earlier in our conversation, I had related a romantic lyric from “All Over The World” and physical labor, a la David Byrne’s concept of creative gardening, sowing ideas by cycling around new cities. Dan shook his head, bringing the conversation back to reality, “Riding your bike around the amount that you want to is a lot different from working manual labor jobs everyday, which is always detrimental to being creative. I remember years ago thinking, What kind of job can I do? Maybe I can do manual outdoor stuff, because then my body will be tired but my mind will be ready to be creative. But that’s not how it works at all; you get done with your day and you’re fucking exhausted.” He mentions the pandemic again, the silver lining in the gift of time and guaranteed income. He says, “You’ve got someone who’s a talented artist, what’s the one thing you can do to help them? Give them money.”

When I ask about current inspirations or media shaping the tour, Dan tells me he’s reading a book called I Deliver Parcels in Beijing, which follows the day of a gig economy worker, a true story that made its author an international bestseller. After the interview, thinking about Dan’s attitude towards his work and his work, I reconsider my question about “See the beating heart of God / Laying down a roll of sod.” There are certainly parallels in the Friendship discography and I Deliver Parcels in Beijing, which I’ve since started reading; even if labor isn’t conducive to creativity, it still takes a special mind to see the beauty in mundane experiences, and then to spin them to a meaningful and true turn of phrase. Even the comment Dan makes of the book reveals his propensity for such insight: “I don’t know what the conditions of a nameless laborer are like over there… but it sure is bigger.”

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Catch Friendship in Europe next summer. Their most recent album is Caveman Wakes Up.