BACKSTORY: Friendship takes its name from a coastal town in Maine an hour from where three-quarters of the band grew up—but it’s hard to imagine a more fitting handle for a tender alt-country act that views porch beers, advice from friends, and everyday ephemera as sacred
FROM: Philadelphia by way of Maine
YOU MIGHT KNOW THEM FROM: Their previous albums on Orindal Records, or you may have caught them on the recent star-studded Through the Soil II charity compilation; there’s also a chance you saw them on tour with the likes of Indigo De Souza or Horse Jumper of Love
NOW: They’re about to release their Merge Records debut, Love the Stranger, which is followed by tour dates with MJ Lenderman and Tenci
Despite its picturesque backdrop off the coast of Maine, Little Cranberry Island doesn’t exactly scream “dream location for a music video shoot.” That’s not an indictment of the island’s roughly 60 permanent residents or their hospitality; as anyone who’s spent time in New England can attest, the most charming small towns seem to prefer staying anonymous.
Even Friendship singer/songwriter Dan Wriggins, who has family and a lobster-fishing job on Little Cranberry Island, didn’t initially think of the Cranberry Isles when comedian Joe Pera reached out about directing a video. “[Pera] pitched a few things that we liked, so we kind of started following him down those roads,” Wriggins recalls from his family’s wood-paneled residence on the island. “But then I mentioned my connection to this place and knowing everyone in this little community.”
Pera was won over by the affordability of filming Wriggins’ family friends over hired actors, but the locals became an extension of Friendship’s unvarnished charm in the resulting video for “Hank.” There’s the grizzled carpenter Henry with a car held together by bungee cords, interpretive nature painter Kaitlyn with their kid Bode in tow, and Wriggins in the middle of it all, singing affirmations about powering through feelings of entropy in his signature rasp. The YouTube comment section is largely fixated on Pera’s involvement, but on the Cranberry Isles Facebook page, the community’s just excited to see some familiar faces on screen.
“When Joe [Pera] first said, ‘Let’s do the video up here,’ I certainly had plenty of mixed feelings—you don’t wanna misrepresent or take advantage when it’s your community of people you love.”
“It's fun to talk about and a little embarrassing, but they love the video, man,” Wriggins attests. “When Joe first said, ‘Let’s do the video up here,’ I certainly had plenty of mixed feelings—you don’t wanna misrepresent or take advantage when it’s your community of people you love.”
Any artist will wax poetic about the importance of community, but for Friendship, it’s practically a fifth member of the band. Wriggins and drummer Mike Cormier-O’Leary were middle school friends turned de facto band kids in high school, recruiting recent graduate Peter Gill on the strength of what they describe as his “outrageously talented” guitar skills. Somewhere between looping Gill in and the band’s DIY debut, 2015’s You’re Going to Have to Trust Me, Friendship locked into a brand of heartfelt alt-country that treated fleeting conversations and minute details about friends as sacred texts to pull from.
It also didn’t hurt to have a frontman as realized as Wriggins, gifted at doling out slice-of-life storytelling in plain-spoken, yet deeply affecting servings. Credit his other jobs as a stern man on lobster boats and groundskeeping in their adoptive home of Philadelphia for a richer worldview than your standard vocalist, but Wriggins never seemed to struggle relating to his peers either. Even as 2017’s Shock Out of Season experimented with synthesizers, and 2019’s Dreamin’ stripped it all back, he kept turning potentially minor details about read receipts or therapeutic conversations over cheap beers into needlepoint-worthy statements for the walls of house show attendees.
“I’m proud of our old albums for what we did with them, [but] this one felt like we accomplished something we hadn't accomplished before,” says Wriggins. He’s referring to Love the Stranger, their first record for Merge Records arriving this week. Where Dreamin’ found beauty in stark minimalism, Stranger is its complete inverse. Spanning 17 songs, Friendship’s latest album is more like a sprawling collage of lived experiences, woven together with five interludes written by three of its members. “To me, it’s about the expansiveness of life,” Wriggins elaborates. “Y’know, being able to make something that’s cohesive, but captures the bigness of the world. I don't think we really ever got that type of thing on the old records, and it’s something I’m always kind of going for.”
“To me, it’s about the expansiveness of life. Y’know, being able to make something that’s cohesive, but captures the bigness of the world. I don't think we really ever got that type of thing on the old records, and it’s something I’m always kind of going for.”
There’s plenty of opportunities to wade into fake-deep waters capturing something as vast and vague as life’s expansiveness, but Wriggins pulls from the John Prine playbook of letting passing observations bloom into earnest revelations across Stranger. The passage of time weighs heavy on Wriggins’ mind as he thinks about a soon-to-be demolished cathedral on the album’s simmering opener “St. Bonaventure,” while lead single “Ugly Little Victory” finds him questioning the balance of companionship and solitude amidst testing a salmon recipe with his partner. Between triumphant anthems on used ramekins and worldviews being dispensed over nips of Jägermeister, there’s apparently no detail too small that Friendship can’t pull some transcendent magic out of.
“I think it’s a product of our seriousness-to-jokes quotient—like the level of how seriously you take your own work,” says Wriggins. “I feel like we struck a great balance where we’re not fucking around and we don't take it too seriously.”
The lack of self-seriousness is a huge part of what makes an album like Stranger land so well, but when asked if he’d prefer life in a touring band or to go back to stuffing bait into bags on a lobster boat, Wriggins is resolute. “[There’s] pros and cons to both, but going on stage and playing shows is a lot more fun,” he concludes with a laugh. “It’ll ruin you in certain ways, but doesn’t ruin your body in the same ways or in the same amount of years. There’s things I love about different types of physical work, lobster fishing especially…but yeah, I’d much rather be an itinerant musician.” FL
