LCD Soundsystem’s “All My Friends”

On February 29, 2024, I participated in the storytelling series Listen To This: Stories and More on Stage. The theme for the show was “That Night a DJ Saved My Life” – true tales of times when music made a difference. Below is the full version of the piece I told onstage.

I want to tell you about a song that I don’t listen to very much: “All My Friends” by LCD Soundsystem.

A few years ago, the musician Nick Cave shared the idea for “hiding songs”:

“My ‘hiding songs’ serve as a form of refuge for me and have done so for years. They are songs that I can pull over myself, like a child might pull the bed covers over their head, when the blaze of the world becomes too intense. I can literally hide inside them. They are the essential pillars that hold up the structure of my artistic world.”

For me, hiding songs for me hit in a distinct way that are powerful and overwhelming. They act both as protection from the outside world as Cave describes, but also in a way that breaks me down, leaving me raw and exposed to myself. I can’t run from these songs. I usually cry when I hear them. To preserve the force of my hiding songs, I purposefully don’t listen to them often. I didn’t even want to listen to the song I am telling you about tonight to prepare for this story! I need their strength for specific moments. It simply can’t be when I’m driving to grab more chips at the Food Lion. But then sometimes I’m driving to buy more chips at the Food Lion, and I know I need to listen to one of my hiding songs. I need to listen to “All My Friends.” With the wonders of cell phone technology, I pull it up and play it very loud. I sing the words loudly too. And I cry. I’m a mess. I take a few minutes to let it wash over me and through me. And then I go buy the chips.

LCD Soundsystem is the brainchild of James Murphy, who formed the band in 2002 as a platform for his obsession with sounds, rhythms, and using his lyrics to track his own relationship with music. Though there are other members of the band, all of the music and lyrics are written by Murphy. 

“All My Friends” begins with two pianos playing a series of notes at a fast pace, so fast that it seems as though one of the players fumbles the part. It’s a little hiccup, almost a slurring of the riff. This flub recalls the idea of wabi-sabi from traditional Japanese aesthetics, which calls for an imperfection in a beautiful form. Either the hiccup was intentional or purposefully left in by Murphy.

The double piano part continues throughout the rest of the song, seemingly on a loop. The piano intro recalls Music for 18 Musicians by composer Steve Reich as the interlocking parts of the Reich piece and the intro to “All My Friends” creates a mesmerizing effect. Soon, the double pianos are joined by percussion parts, both electronically generated and played by Murphy himself. The meshing of the two percussion approaches is one of the great tricks of LCD Soundsystem: the marriage of electronic music with human-made instrumental performances.

After a long instrumental introduction, Murphy finally starts to sing: 

That’s how it starts
We go back to your house.

It’s a perfect opening as he introduces the idea of a group of friends preparing for a night out, and it’s also the beginning of the song — “That’s how it starts.” Murphy is in full GenX meta-voice, initiating the song’s theme and subject matter, while at the same time, commenting on the song itself. College paid for something. 

Skipping ahead, Murphy sings:

We set controls for the heart of the sun
One of the ways we show our age
And if the sun comes up, if the sun comes up, if the sun comes up
And I still don’t wanna stagger home
Then it’s the memory of our betters
That are keeping us on our feet.

The line “set controls for the heart of the sun” is swiped from the title of a song off of Pink Floyd’s 1968 album A Saucerful of Secrets. The Pink Floyd song is a late 60s psychedelic romp, filled with burbles and flashing musical sound effects. Murphy nods to the experimentation — both drugs and musical — of the previous generation, while creating something new for himself. The line “the memory of our betters” could be a recognition of his nicking a line from the Pink Floyd guys. 

Still, “We set controls for the heart of the sun” is the best description of the anticipation felt before a night out with friends. Knowing that there are plans in place — to see a band perform, to go dancing, to go to a friend’s party, to hit the town — makes the expectations soar to unreasonable heights. These lines summon hopes for some sort of peak or a connection, whether intellectual or physical. The line conjures experience laced with alcohol, drugs, sex, or music. The sun comes up and you don’t want the night to end because the possibilities for more of these experiences remain endless.  

Murphy continues:

It comes apart
The way it does in bad films.

These are funny lines because Murphy knows that “All My Friends” could fit into the same narratives that he’s seen hundreds of times before in basic cable movies. Despite this self-deprecating joke, “All My Friends” has a cinematic feel to it. Heck, the song itself is a movie.

Murphy was 37 when the song came out. At that point, he knew he had missed the chance to hit big when he was young. As the popularity of LCD Soundsystem has grown, he’s achieved some measure of fame and attention, yet he still carries some of his old resentment in the last verse of “All My Friends”:

And with a face like a dad and a laughable stand
You can sleep on the plane or review what you said
When you’re drunk and the kids look impossibly tanned
You think over and over, “Hey, I’m finally dead.”

“A face like a dad” is such a funny self-realization, knowing that he looks too old to be a rock star as the other artists around him are “impossibly tanned.” In that situation, he’s going to feel as if he’s “finally dead.” “A face like a dad” also reminds me of one of my favorite things tonight’s host ever said in those moments that he recognizes that he is the oldest one at a party or a concert: “Great, who brought their dad?” It’s a moment of taking a look at yourself: “Maybe it’s time to go home now.”

A backdrop for “All of My Friends” is drugs, which Murphy directly references in the song:

Though when we’re running out of the drugs
And the conversation’s winding away.

Murphy has always been honest about drugs and how they allowed him to understand something about his life and his art. Murphy said the following in an interview with Chuck Klosterman:

“When it comes to drugs, I’m a big proponent of the boat-sails-wind analogy: your life is a boat, the sails are your emotions, and drugs are the wind. When you’re a kid, your boat is small and your sail is huge, and drugs are like a hurricane. So you need to get to a point in life where you have a big enough boat to navigate the weather.”

How does he put it in “All My Friends”?

I wouldn’t trade one stupid decision
For another five years of life.

It’s the ultimate statement of the #noregrets persona: Consequence free, let’s sail into the night, into the heart of the sun. It’s a line so ambitious that it could make you want to leave the theater now and get it tattooed somewhere on your person. Murphy knows that, on one level, it’s eye-rollingly dumb, especially if you have kids and loved ones who depend on you. Yet in that situation with excess and freedom, a reckless decision is absolutely necessary. Why wouldn’t you make the trade of a peak experience for five years of old age. 

This brings us to the central theme of “All My Friends,” which is named in the title itself and courses through the music, the drugs, and the acknowledgement of aging: friends. Murphy sings:

You spent the first five years trying to get with the plan
And the next five years trying to be with your friends again.

And then later:

You drop the first ten years just as fast as you can
And the next ten people who are trying to be polite.

He ends the song by first asking, “Where are your friends tonight?” and then, “If I could see all my friends tonight.” He doesn’t finish the thought but repeats it as he ponders what he would do and what he would say. But he can’t or won’t come out and say what’s in his heart. Perhaps it’s because when you do see friends, you don’t say the things you wish you could say. It could be because it’s the wrong time and place. Or maybe it’s fear. So, Murphy leaves it unsaid. Tonight, I’ll say a few of those things that he leaves unsaid. 

“All My Friends” came out in March 2007, but I didn’t hear it until the following December. I know the specific date because I searched my Gmail account, and I found an email that I wrote to a friend:

“You must download LCD Soundsystem’s song ‘All My Friends’ as soon as you can. And be deliberate about listening to it. It’s not good for casual listening. It’s been haunting me for a couple of days now.”

Instantly a hiding song.

Why did I come to the song so late? Our daughter was born in September of that year. I can put myself into that time when I was first caring for her as a baby and displaced from my friends and putting aside those nights of abandonment and setting the controls for the heart of the sun. There’s an isolation with being a new parent. Sure, you see friends, but the goals are different. Your friends are going through changes too; some are similar, and some are completely different. 

Listening to “All My Friends” for me is a form of time travel, imagining memories of friends from over the years before I was a parent. I think about questions: What happened to them? Why don’t I know them better? How come my only interaction with them is an occasional comment on a random Facebook post about hot dogs in Los Angeles? Why don’t we set the course for the heart of the sun RIGHT NOW?

Once, a friend wrote to me about a night that he and his family were driving to a party. “All My Friends” was playing in the car. His teenage son said, “This song is all about hours and years and days and time and friends.”

My wife’s wife replied, “Yeah, and what do you think that means?”

His son said, “I dunno. That he just wants to depress people?”

That’s a perfect teenage response to “All My Friends” because you need to be older to understand it. It’s not a teenage song or even a song when you’re 22, which is the age group most rock music or dance songs are aimed at. Instead, it’s for when you’re 37, like James Murphy when he wrote it. Or when you’re 49 years, four months, and 29 days old like I am today. Hopefully it will resonate when I’m 79 years, four months, and 29 days old.

I often conflate the voice of James Murphy with one of my favorite writers, the late David Foster Wallace. Both speak to me with the weight of the cool older brother that I never had. Here’s a quote from Wallace about the fundamental purpose of art:

“Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties — all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name’s Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bones no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion — these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.”

Wallace’s contention here aligns with Cave’s idea about hiding songs. They both feed into my love for “All My Friends.” It was delivered to me when I became a parent and now there was someone who relied on me and my wife in order to grow up and become her own person. I was filled with love, but I was also deeply scared about that task. Listening to the song since, I reflect on the regrets I have for friends and lovers in my life. Becoming a parent marks the moment of a shift in priorities away from friends and towards family. 

But this song isn’t about regrets. It’s about the promise we possess in being human and it makes me feel less alone. Maybe I can’t be with my friends or if we are together, it’s not the same as when we were younger but I’m grateful that it happened. “I wouldn’t trade one stupid decision / For another five years of life.”

“All My Friends” is a song about hope and optimism. I think about our daughter and son and the nights that they’ll have with their friends, the stories that they’ll tell years later, stories of the bizarre, stories they’ll never tell me as their dad.

When I listen to “All My Friends” now, I cry for what happened and what can never happen again. I cry for me, my friends, and my kids and for the friendships they’ll get and lose along the way. I cry for their own stupid decisions. It’s for all of these reasons why I rarely listen to “All My Friends.” I want to save it for the times that I need it.

James Murphy writing “All My Friends” was an act of finding his voice at an age that traditionally was thought of as too old to become a star. Throw that out the window. Murphy was the perfect age to write this song, a hiding song. A song that’s there when you have to break the glass in case of emergency. A song you wouldn’t trade for another five years of life. 

Image: Ian T. McFarland from Los Angeles, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.