Like, if you see a photo of yourself from a couple years earlier, and you're like, ‘That's what my hair looked like?’ You just imagine in your brain that you looked the same and that your friends look the way they look now when you picture back.” -Scott Plagenhoefī-side of the DFA single “All My Friends” 2007įor all of James Murphy's crazy love for Can-see for example that Future Days shirt he sported so often in the band's early press photos-most of LCD's sleek disco-derived grooves aren't overtly indebted to the legendary krautrock band's shouldn't-work-but-does combo of neatly groomed James Brown-ian funk and hairy psychedelic jamming. “For me, it always feels like I'm coming from the same place, the same way that you always think you looked the same all the time. “Things happen in your life that change things,” he told The A.V. He's walking away, retiring his band, but that's an admirable measure of control that we don't always grant ourselves. James Murphy retained a measure of control over his most recent personal landmark, of course. Turning corners, tipping points, sliding doors-the big moments and changes in life aren't like points in the film where the moral kicks in. That's inevitable of course-we all age, we all die-but we don't always recognize the changes coming. Laced with humor and pathos, and crafted with a sharp observational eye, “All My Friends” is an oddly paced song, with its patient build soundtracking its more celebratory moments before climaxing over the track's most devastatingly cutting observations-Murphy and his “face like a dad” throwing his hands up and claiming “I'm finally dead” as he watches the impossibly tanned people younger and better-looking than him. Its sentiments simply translate into something so much greater and universal to LCD's audience-the effects of aging, responsibility, domesticity, and even mortality onto a life spent inside and obsessed with what is nominally youth culture. (The confessional “to tell the truth, this could be the last time”-which people will lose their shit over this Saturday at MSG-hints that Murphy was thinking even then about hanging it up early.) Despite a fairly straightforward and detail-heavy narrative, the song is now barely ever discussed in that context. I always think about lyrics and what they actually mean and then I realized the energy I respond to physically people respond to emotionally.”Ī tour diary song, “All My Friends” relates the grind and the joy and the toil and turmoil of being on the road, living hard, missing the people at home.
“I didn't realize what emotional impact melody has on people. “‘All My Friends’ woke me up to something else,” he told The Quietus. One big shift was that the lyrics to these songs were more nakedly emotional and contemplative they didn't scan like the surface, in-the-moment lyrics that dotted the band's earliest singles and much of its debut LP.Īnother shift was that James Murphy connected melody with emotional nourishment. As the twin centerpieces of Sound of Silver, “Someone Great” and “All My Friends” located a side of LCD Soundsystem that people didn't expect. “You spend the first five years trying to get with the plan, and the next five years trying to be with your friends again,” LCD sing in “All My Friends,” outlining a pretty common progression in and out of hipsterdom. Doesn't anybody get it? Alright, nobody gets it. “‘Losing My Edge’ made me really cool which I think is the funniest, most absurd thing ever. “The funny thing is, when I most publicly tried to deal with that issue was what made me the coolest,” Murphy explained to The Wire in 2005. (In the case of the former, Murphy never returned the calls with Britney he shared a listening session then she went to dinner and never returned.) In short, despite starting his career with a song about no longer being cool, James Murphy was all of a sudden cool. Artists like Janet Jackson and Britney Spears asked about working with Murphy. DFA became shorthand first for the nascent genre dance-punk, and then for open-minded, open-eared, rhythmic indie music in general. Pretty quickly, however, the circle of artists, DJs, and performers around DFA Records began to be seen as not only a scene but the scene in New York City. “The way you determine what a cool kid is you look around and see how everybody else feels.”
When DFA Records started, one of the first pieces of advice James Murphy gave to his star charges, the Rapture, was to “ get out of the scene.” “I just don't like scenes, it's just like high school-there's cool kids and not cool kids,” Muprhy explained. Written by James Murphy, Patrick Mahoney, Tyler Pope
A-side of the DFA single “All My Friends” 2007
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