A piano that will not land, chasing a Joy Division swell
Two pianos, or one piano refusing to resolve, hammer a figure that stumbles and then refuses the stumble as an excuse to stop. The vocal does not enter for a long time. When James Murphy does sing, he is already mid-list: the things you do when you are young, the drugs, the nights, the friends who were the point. All My Friends is seven and a half minutes of a party that knows it is ending and keeps the lights on anyway. The bass and drums arrive like people who were in the kitchen. Nothing about the track is a drop. It is an accumulation, and the accumulation is the feeling he was chasing.
He wrote it, with Pat Mahoney and Tyler Pope, for Sound of Silver, released in 2007, out of the DFA rooms in New York, Murphy in his late thirties and done pretending that late thirties was a side note. He told Mojo in January 2008 that he did not know why the song struck people, except that it was sad-ish and people are old. He had been trying to chase the feeling of Joy Division’s Transmission, a thing that starts gentle and becomes overwhelming, the head exploding by the time the dance is commanded. He heard the same want in an Arthur Russell record, Dinosaur L’s Go Bang, the simplest wish: to see all his friends at once, to get the chance to go back. The piano’s repetition owes a debt to minimalism, the kind of pattern that feels like it might be a mistake and is not. Pitchfork and Mojo both called the track the year’s best. Guardian readers did something similar. The votes were for a song about the votes getting harder to gather.
Live, the figure is a test of stamina and of sentiment. Murphy shouts where are your friends tonight as if the question were still open, and the rooms answer by being the friends, which is a kindness the lyric only half believes. The song does not scold youth. It misses the scale of it, the sail too big for the boat, a metaphor he has used elsewhere and that this track does not need to state. You hear the miss in the piano’s refusal to cadence. A ballad would have cried and finished. This one keeps the party technically happening.
I don’t know. It’s sad-ish and people are old. I was purposefully trying to chase a feeling I got from Joy Division’s Transmission, which starts off so gentle and becomes so overwhelming.
(James Murphy, Mojo, 2008)
He has said, later, that All My Friends is one of the songs where he got something right, not necessarily the best written, the one that landed its point the way a cook lands a chicken. The modesty is accurate. The point is not clever. It is the wish to have everyone in one room before the room changes function. Writing that at thirty-seven, over a piano that sounds like it learned its part from Steve Reich and a hangover, was the right age. Younger, and the sadness would have been a costume. Older, and the costume might have won.
What remains is the non-landing. All My Friends still will not sit down. The friends in the title are a census the singer knows he will fail, and the failure is danced, not confessed in a smaller song. If you came for the drop, you get the opposite: a rise that does not crest, and a question the kick drum is too polite to answer.
