Friendship - Caveman Wakes Up (Vinyl LP) PRE-ORDER

Expected Release Date: 16-May-2025 - This Pre-order will be shipped on or just before this date. Release dates are subject to alteration.

An album for sleeping and waking, walking and driving, hunting and fishing, for loitering outside a roadhouse on the haunted tundra. Okay in elevators, not
great for dinner. On Caveman Wakes Up, Friendship’s new album and second for Merge Records, the band’s historically capacious definition of country music
grows wider still. Shambolic guitars are offset by flute pads, bleary poetry is set against a Motown rhythm section, a song about Jerry Garcia and First Lady
Betty Ford fades out with a drum solo, like if Talk Talk came from a dingy Philadelphia basement and was fronted by James Tate. Songwriter Dan Wriggins’
ragged baritone cuts through eleven murky, swirling country-rock songs with profound lyrical substance and sincerity. Like an alarm clock incorporated into
the edge of a dream, Caveman Wakes Up belongs equally to the conscious and subconscious mind, fraught with background, steeped in reference and
experimentation, delivered casually and as a dire warning, dedicated, above all, to music’s creative soul. Over the years, dedication has paid off. Friendship
has become a kind of reverse supergroup,
wherein the band itself and each individual member are located centrally in an increasingly prominent scene of young folk and country musicians and
songwriters. Drummer Michael Cormier O’Leary leads the instrumental collective Hour and, along with bassist Jon Samuels, runs Dear Life Records, home to
friends and peers who count Friendship as a major influence including MJ Lenderman, Florry, and Fust. (Samuels also plays lead guitar in MJ Lenderman and
the Wind). Guitarist Peter Gill’s band 2nd Grade records prolifically. Wriggins began writing the songs of Caveman Wakes Up on a downtuned classical guitar
of Lenderman’s and finished on a barely tuned piano in an apartment he shared with Sadurn’s G DeGroot.
In the summer of 2023, Wriggins had just left the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where his love for poetry and mistrust for the academic poetry world grew in
tandem. A relationship fell apart, and Wriggins crashed for several weeks at Lenderman and Wednesday’s Karly Hartzman’s home in North Carolina, where he
recorded the first demos of “Resident Evil,” “All Over the World,” and “Love Vape.” Wriggins returned to Philadelphia, and the band got to work on new ideas,
finally tracking the album in five days with engineer Jeff Ziegler (Mary Lattimore, War on Drugs). Wriggins recorded vocals with Love the Stranger engineer
Bradford Kreiger, and organ, violin (Jason Calhoun), and flute (Adelyn Strei) were recorded by Lucas Knapp in a West Philadelphia church.
TRACKLISTING
1. Salvage Title
2. Tree of Heaven
3. Betty Ford
4. Free Association
5. Hollow Skulls
6. Artex
7. Love Vape
8. Wildwood in January
9. Resident Evil
10. All over the World
11. Fantasia