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“All My Friends” – LCD Soundsystem
(Words/music: James Murphy, Pat Mahoney, and Tyler Pope, available on Sound of Silver, DFA 2007)

Officially, Some Songs Considered was born last New Year’s Day, driving west on the Mass Pike on my way from Boston back to Connecticut, as it was during this two hour drive that I worked out the idea for it.  However, in some ways the groundwork for the project started a little more than a year earlier when I connected on a strangely personal level with “All My Friends.”  Sound of Silver came out during a period of time where I felt in limbo and could identify with James Murphy’s meditation on growing old.  The strange thing – and the one that compelled me to write about it in the first place – was that I wasn’t the only one with these musical epiphanies.  Writers Tom Breihan and Hua Hsu wrote two separate pieces detailing their personal experiences with the song.  Breihan’s described an intensely personal experience in the midst of a single recap piece, while Hsu focused on the balance of nostalgia and melancholy in the song as well as a “pleasant shock of recognizing [his] newly 30 year-old self within it.”   In many ways, my goal (often unstated) was to do both of these things – capture the raw personal reaction Breihan shares and the eloquent and potent analysis that Hsu explicates.  Some days, I come closer than others (and other days I lose sight of these twin goals), but they remain, among others, the guiding thoughts dictating these posts.

Of course, it’s only appropriate that Hsu, Breihan, myself, and many others respond in such profound ways to “All My Friends.”  It’s a testament to the song itself – so eloquently described by Hsu in his Slate article that I won’t go too far into it.  Still, nearly two and a half years after first hearing Sound of Silver, the opening piano chords still rope me in and rouse my spirit in the way that few other songs accomplish.  If nothing else, this realization makes me cherish those rare nights with my distant friends even more.  Perhaps someday I’ll outgrow the song the same way I grew into it, but until that day I’ll spin the record, take stock of my life, and think about all my friends near and far.

More on LCD Soundsystem: Allmusic | Amazon MP3 | Emusic | Last.fm