For me, one of the saddest things about LCD Soundsystem’s “All My Friends” is that I don’t remember the first time I listened to it. I can’t point to the one moment in 2007—the year Sound of Silver, their career-defining sophomore effort on which the track first appeared— when I first heard that incessant piano, nervously grinding out the same two chords for almost eight minutes. In all honestly I think I dismissed "All My Friends" after a first listening. I actually recall complaining about its repetitiveness with some of my friends from back home.
It seems hyperbolic to label “All My Friends” something as powerful as, “my favorite song of all time,” or even, “the defining song of my high school experience,” so I’ll do my best to resist the temptation. A temptation I won’t be able to resist while talking about “All My Friends” is getting sappy, so if sentimentality or nostalgia puts a bad taste in your mouth—starting now—stop drinking this milkshake.
Although it depresses me that I can’t remember the first time I ever heard “All My Friends,” I suppose it’d be too much to ask for a song to immediately click on the first listening in some cinematic moment that I look back on for the rest of my life. For a piece of music like “All My Friends” to carry with it so many memories, to bring me to bittersweet tears, without failure, after every listening, I need to grow with it, to learn from it, to hear something different each time. In many respects, the fact that I can’t remember the first time I listened to “All My Friends” only testifies to the song’s complete and encompassing presence in my life. For all intents and purposes, it has always been there.
It was there on October 6th, 2007, when LCD Soundsystem opened for Arcade Fire on Randall’s Island in New York City.
At the time, no band dominated my life as intensely as Arcade Fire. I had attended their transcendent show at Radio City Music Hall earlier that year, and naturally, my teenage penchant for hyperbole was quick to label them, “my favorite band.” So when they announced the final concert of their Neon Bible tour at Randall’s Island with a slew of irresistible opening acts—notably LCD Soundsystem—I, along with my two best friends Justin and Oliver, prepared for the concert as any bat-shit insane fans might: by showing up a full ten hours earlier than the venue opened. From moping about in the early morning haze until other fans showed up, to sprinting across half a mile of open field until I reached the stage—caked in sweat, chest in flames—I learned something about how far I was willing to go to truly dedicate myself to the music I loved.
That night, by the time “All My Friends” floated into the middle of LCD Soundsystem’s early evening set, my body hated me with all the vehemence of a tortured prisoner. Even my mind, consistently energetic throughout the day but now thirsty for adrenaline, stumbled into something of a daze. As drummer Pat Mahoney’s cymbals fluttered to life amidst the haunting echo of synthesized handclaps piercing through the night air, LCD Soundsystem brought out Jeremy Gara from the Arcade Fire to crunch out the piano line. Perhaps my sheer exhaustion made it effortless for the song to transfix me so completely, but in that moment, bobbing my head along with my two best friends to a song that we barely knew at the time, “All My Friends” started to mean something.
Part of what always draws me in about “All My Friends” is the way both singer and band seem to build confidence over the course of the song’s slow burn. At first, those two piano chords feel awkward and chunky, like a dying car puttering along a cobblestone road. Gradually, a high hat fades in, delicately tapped but necessarily persistent. A bass line joins it, and together they push the piano forward, helping it to find its stride as the percussion swells into lead singer James Murphy’s self-reflexive opening line: “that’s how it starts.”
Murphy wrote “All My Friends” in his mid-thirties, probably around a time he started to realize that settling down and starting a family meant giving up a lifestyle of getting fucked up all the time. Throughout the song, Murphy explores his own uncertainty and regret about growing older. For him, part of that transition into adulthood means leaving behind many of the friendships and freedoms of his youth, a difficult reality he eventually learns to accept.
I started to experience “All My Friends” in the fall of my senior year of high school, a time about as transitional as they come. The summer leading into that semester was my first summer free of any family vacations or teen programs whisking me away from the balm of the city. My mother commanded me to find a job, but mostly I just smoked weed and went to concerts with Oliver and Justin. I started off the summer by ending my first real high school relationship, and began pursuing another girl. I quickly fell in love with her over the course of several weeks, but nothing ever came of it, and by the end of that summer I experienced my first real sense of crippling heartbreak. I also managed to burn bridges with my friend Ryan rather dramatically in the process, but grew to love another one of my friends, Maxx, for her support. By the time senior year started in September, I looked back on the prior months as some of the best in my life. Sometimes I still think of them that way.
That night in October, watching James Murphy croon into the microphone about the uninhibited freedoms of his youth, I thought of that summer before. “Though when we’re running out of the drugs / And the conversation’s winding away / I wouldn’t trade one stupid decision / For another five years of life,” Murphy sang, to me as much as to any other naïve kid in that audience feeling the invincibility of young adulthood. Every moment of that summer—every joint I smoked, every shot I took, and every minute I spewing my feelings into a telephone—I felt invincible. Of course, if anything that summer taught me just how much invincibility I lacked, but weeks later, hearing a man on stage stick up for stupid decisions, I wanted to cling onto that feeling just as stubbornly.
That night occurred months before any of my friends or I had started to grapple with the sad reality of leaving each other for colleges unknown. Despite that, I still felt a brief tightness in my throat when Murphy sang, “to tell the truth, this could be the last time.” Nowadays when I listen to the song, I still choke up whenever I hear that line. In the moments leading up to it at Randall’s Island, the band seemed to tear through their instruments as if their lives depended on it; as if that show really could have been the last time. Murphy lurched in place like a drunkard, Pat Mahoney’s drumming grew from forceful to frantic, but no one in the band responded as literally to the line as guitarist Al Doyle. He convulsed back and forth on stage, attacking his guitar so spastically the instrument could have been on fire. In concert, whenever the band reaches this point in “All My Friends”, it’s impossible not to share their rampant spirit; it’s why everyone roars whenever Murphy sings “this could be the last time.”
The lyrics that define “All My Friends” for me come at the very end, and they always usher in most of the memories and emotions I associate with the song. While the rest of the band blazes beneath him, Murphy’s voice, both wistful and euphoric at the same time, shouts, “you forgot what you meant when you read what you said / And you always knew you were tired, but then / Where are your friends tonight.” To this day, no lyrics speak to my days in high school as appropriately. Thinking back on how many times I spilled my emotions to friends and flings through as impersonal of a method of communication as text messaging and email, forgetting what I meant when I read what I said happened quite a lot.
But it’s the very last lines that move me the most, because no matter where I am or what I’m doing, whenever Murphy asks me where my friends are tonight, I’m never really sure. Some of those friends live thousands of miles away. Some of them I just don’t talk to anymore. Either way, leaving high school meant leaving those closest to me, or at least leaving a time when we could all be together at once. This upcoming summer, two of my best friends plan to live in Washington DC. Another close friend is working the entire summer in upstate New York, and Justin plans to spend his summer in San Francisco. I cry when I listen to “All My Friends” because I can’t answer that question—more often than not, I don’t know where my friends are tonight. Even that night in October, leaning against the front rail at Randall’s Island with Justin and Oliver, I still couldn’t answer the question, not after the summer before. Murphy too wanted to answer that question, and, in the song’s final line, he wailed desperately, “if I could see all my friends tonight” over and over again until the music collapsed. I couldn’t help but think the same; anxiously, but in vain, I wanted to share that moment with all my friends.
I used to refer to that concert nostalgically (but confidently) as the greatest I had ever been to, that day as the greatest of my life. After only 4 years, it seems a bit hasty to dismiss those claims as naïve. I’m still too young to laugh off the lengths I went following my endlessly consuming love for music, especially considering I continue to push myself to those extremes: two weeks ago, I waited seven hours in forty degree weather outside of Madison Square Garden for LCD Soundsystem’s final concert ever. That concert gave new meaning to the line, “this could be the last time,” and when Murphy sang it, I sobbed. But that’s another story.