Old Friends

Posted on March 5, 2021

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I’d been working on Old Friends since November, 2020. My initial sprint on the song happened towards the end of the month and into early December. I couldn’t really decide how I wanted the song to start – I tried a slow buildup, but it felt wrong, and even I lost interest while listening to it (which isn’t a good thing, because I’m usually pretty into my own music). I tried a shorter buildup, but then it ended up feeling like a contrived fade-in, and it failed to capture my interest. Eventually, I opted for the intro that you hear now – just my friend Drew saying “I fuck with old friends, for sure”, and then the beat starts. No frills, no waiting around for a buildup, good for my own shortening attention span and hopefully yours as well.

The “Brent Barker” voicemail interlude in the middle isn’t his actual voicemail – Brent (one of my friends from studying abroad in Paris) sent me that soundbite to use in a lofi song. This song isn’t lofi at all, though. Maybe some day I’ll use it in one.

Cover art

The album cover is me and Riley Freeberg, one of my closest old friends. We’re at a birthday party in McDonald’s in this photo. I count six candles on the cake. What a time to be alive.

Spotify Canvas

If you’re a spotify user, you’ll be able to watch the canvas while you listen to the song (the 7-second looping video thing). For those of you who aren’t on spotify, you can watch it here (page password: canvas). The canvas is made up of old home videos of my old friend Mason and I playing together. Quite a few of the clips also make it into the….

Old Friends Music Video

I’m super proud of this music video! I threw it together in the days leading up to the release of the song. Throughout the entire video, you can see old videogames scrolling along the top, while various nostalgic video edits of my old friends and me doing stuff pop in and out of existence. The background color changer is “live”; I created it by screen recording my desktop background, changing the colors in time with the beat of the song. The colors are mostly neon – I feel like neon coloring captures the aesthetic of my childhood pretty well, so I left the sharp colors unedited. It’s designed to be an entirely stimulating audio-visual experience.

You can watch the music video here: