Friendship is good. FRENSHIP are good. Having a friendship with FRENSHIP, then, is very good indeed; that’s just simple logic. When they’re on their own, the Los Angeles duo of James Sunderland and Brett Hite play a winswept, cinematic brand of synth-pop, the kind of music you imagine bursting forth the moment you first kiss your first love. That sweetness made their songs “Capsize” and “1000 Nights” both hits.
So imagine our surprise when we asked Sunderland and Hite to put together acoustic versions of the two songs for Original Tracks, our video series in partnership with Original Penguin. Armed with only a pair of guitars and a couple of supplemental singers, the duo strip down their synthy hits, revealing them to be dusky folk songs at their core; at a root level, they have more in common with the populist classic country of Alabama, say, than they do their radio-ready contemporaries. It’s a delightful surprise, and one you can hear on the version of “Capsize” that Penguin premiered last month, as well as on “1000 Nights,” which we’re presenting below.
