Name: Love the Stranger
Brand: Friendship

Bonus disc

Bonus disc: No

Catalogue number

MRG797LPC1

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Colour

Blue

Colour details

Blue and White

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Discogs ID

Format multiplier

Download code

Download code: Yes

Rough Trade Exclusive

Rough Trade Exclusive: No

Extended format

Extended format: Yes

Format detail

Format Music GB

Limited edition

Release date

2022-07-29

Signed copies

Signed copies: No

Supplier GB

Cargo

Tax rate GB

Standard:20

UPC / Barcode

0673855079707

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Total Cap

1 / Extended format: Yes / LP / Rough Trade Exclusive: No / Signed copies: No / blue

MRG797LP

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Black

Extended format: No

0673855079714

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1 / Extended format: No / LP / Rough Trade Exclusive: No / Signed copies: No / black

Artist

Friendship

Genre GB

Country / Americana

Label GB

Merge Records

Merge Records is an independent record label based in Durham, North Carolina. Founded in 1989 by Laura Ballance and Mac McCaughan, it started as a platform to release music from their band Superchunk and their friends' creations. Over the years, Merge Records has grown to include talented artists from all over the world, with some of their records even reaching the top of the Billboard music charts.
With its headquarters nestled in Durham, North Carolina, Merge Records has become a renowned name in the music industry. The label was established by Laura Ballance and Mac McCaughan back in 1989 with a vision to share their own musical endeavors as well as support fellow musicians within their circle.
What began as a humble endeavor quickly flourished into something much greater. Today, Merge Records boasts an impressive roster of artists spanning various genres and backgrounds. From indie rock to experimental pop, *Superchunk* paved the way for other talented musicians to join forces under this esteemed label's umbrella.

Back In Stock

Friendship’s Merge debut, Love the Stranger, moves like a country record skipping in just the right spot, leaving its fellow travelers longing for a place they’ve only visited in their dreams. Guitarist Peter Gill, drummer Michael Cormier-O’Leary, bassist Jon Samuels, and hawkeyed balladeer Dan Wriggins map out the group’s particular, breathtaking landscape and invite the listener to share in its glory.

Love the Stranger’s invitation is all the more wondrous because its characters have clearly been hurt before. “I need solitude and I also need you,” Wriggins reckons in “Ugly Little Victory.”

Wide awake, vulnerable, and gimmickless, Friendship won’t hesitate to confide in us, or even ask for help when the moment calls, like on the lyrical centerpiece of “Alive Twice”: Under your eyeball spell, I was losing myself/ Not in the good way you used to talk about / I remember a day, Cedar Park Cafe/ I was in a bad place and you set me straight/ With your on-the-nose advice.

Between instrumental pit stops at “Kum and Go” and “Quickchek,” local references in Love the Stranger create a catalog of human perception, presented as roadside attractions. From grape jelly residue (“Ramekin”) to the site of a demolished cathedral (“St. Bonaventure”) to King of the Hill quotations (“Smooth Pursuit”), the record’s images craft a symbolic language of high and low Americana, both evocative and consistently accessible. Spending time with Love the Stranger creates a community one in which the window between the listener and the music[1]maker shatters in full, until all that remains are the fragments you decide to pick up together.

Like its sprawling lyrical references, Love the Stranger’s production is both familiar and capacious enough for pedal steel, synth strings, airy folk guitar field recordings, and MIDI pad exploration to work in vital harmony. Influenced by Friendship’s punk and indie peers as much as road-star forebears like Lucinda Williams and Lambchop, Wriggins says of the recording sessions: “We all got to stretch out, chase our personal musical fixations, and build on each others’ work. 

Bradford Krieger, our engineer at Big Nice Studio, has a mind-blowing creative energy and hundreds (thousands?) of instruments.” He recalls further: “I wanted the album to sound like Emmylou Harris and the Hot Band in the ’70s. Pete wanted it to sound like a semi full of spent fuel rods, barreling towards a runaway truck ramp. Jon kept reminding us that the studio is an instrument, and Michael wanted it to sound like the breakdown two-and-a-half minutes into Shuggie Otis’ ‘Strawberry Letter 23.’”

Some breakdowns, however, are irreparable. Wriggins, a manual laborer and poet, calls “Hank” “a song about when you go to fix something that’s broken and realize the tools you’re supposed to fix it with are also broken.” Form follows function on the mesmerizing outro of the single, which buzzes with the sound of a shoddy Craigslist guitar from Woonsocket, RI (incidentally, the home of the Museum of Work and Culture) getting chainsawed in two. Friendship is probably already your favorite band’s favorite band, a long-revered IYKYK of DIY with a devoted cult following from Wawa to In-N-Out. With Love the Stranger, the Friendship universe only continues to expand and grow more open-hearted, more inviting, with every passing note. It’s a record that locates the listener exactly where the listener is, and wherever that may be, makes a friend out of them, too. All said and done, the age-old maxim of “Mr. Chill” holds true: “You be real with me and I’ll be real with you”