track by Nora Marks
“Friction (But You Still Did)” is one of those songs that showed up more or less fully formed, the big idea incubating beneath the surface long enough that when I finally grasped it walking down the hallway at my old job, all I had to do was let it unfold and make sure to write it down.
Shouldn’t be a big surprise, since the narrative here is based upon the (at the time) crumbling long-term marriage of a close friend. It was a story I was living through day-by-day with new scenarios or situations or ultimatums or decisions building upon each other and playing out in real time. I was pretty fresh into my marriage at the time, just starting to get this band going and starting to take careers and relationships more seriously. To Be More Mature and Adult. A kid was a real possibility in some sort of undetermined future.
What I was seeing happen in the context of this adjacent and flailing relationship was something that I felt like I understood, both intellectually and deep in my bones. Male hubris and poor decision making and the fear of disappearing into the void of fatherhood and someone else’s story. It was precisely what I was trying to push back or skip around with this band, my last ditch effort at making music and art a defining priority in my life. I couldn’t help by find sympathy for the person at fault, because I saw how easily I could be that person when faced with the overwhelming existential terror of becoming someone who gets sucked into the vacuum of routine adulthood and losing any ties to the things that you feel make you special.
That fear is what this song is really about, more than any specific relationship or situation. Fear of seeing yourself for who you’ve become; fear of never being sure of who you were. In a lot of ways, I see it as the prequel to the character in “Drinking for One,” off of our first EP (which came out 7 months before this single). “Friction” was actually written around the time of the rest of that record and was already played live by the band at least once before we went in and recorded it. Mostly, we ran out of time during the recording of We Don’t Have to Do This, and this was the song we were least confident in at the time. Funny, because it’s since become a band favorite and staple in our live shows.
The writing process was interesting in how chunked it was. The basic foundation of this song — the version of it that is performed when I play it at solo acoustic shows — was established in a day. As mentioned, the first verse and chorus(es) showed up while I was at work, and I used a keyboard app on my phone to figure out the chords and write everything out. I went for a run when I got home and used that time to come up with the ideas for the second first; the first half came easily and is a natural extension of what’s happening in the first verse. The latter part of the second verse is a little more abstract, but comes from and circles around this theme of anxiety induced by a drastically changing society, where a lot of our down time, when we should be relaxing, is spent plugged in and paying attention to what everyone else is doing and the ways in which they’re “out there” having fun or being productive. It’s how we’re kind of constantly passive-aggressively exaggerating the quality and worth of our activities in a way that makes the people watching question the value of how they’re spending their time. In essence, we’re doing the work of inducing FOMO or shame or anxiety in others for the people who want to keep us constantly working and spending money (which go hand-in-hand, of course).
Robbie used to think the line about “moving out and leaving us the couch,” was about how Amanda and I continued to use the couch in the apartment that we all once lived in together after Robbie moved out, but that wasn’t the idea (maybe in my subconscious). The house and couch are more metaphors for generations of people who have been ambling toward ideas of “growth” and “better” lives without stopping to question what those ideas actually entail and what the ramifications of their desires might be. Glued to the TV (or smartphone) and watching and wanting. Three generations of staying inside the house, losing or forgetting the importance of actual human connection in favor of collecting stuff that they can stow away in their living space. Then they’re gone, and we’re left with this huge, bulky piece of furniture that we’re responsible for. If anything, this was pulled from my family’s experience of cleaning out the home of my great-grandparents after they’d passed away and seeing just how much stuff they’d collected and kept all over their property throughout the years and thinking, “to what end?”
To scale this down to the narrative of the song, it’s like you want things and want attention and you want experiences and strive for these things in the name of blind ambition and one day, whether you’ve attained your goals or not, you stop and assess what you do and don’t have and come to find you’re a different person than the one who had those grandiose ideas. And you don’t really know what it was that was driving you that whole time.
After the run, I put the song away thinking I’d revisit and finish later and went to the backyard to play with my dogs. In the midst of this activity (I was maybe stoned), I thought about what we were doing and the movements and patterns we were creating with our activity and I thought down, down, down to the subatomic level and the fact of no two pieces of matter are ever actually touching or connected. What a bleak metaphor for human relationships. And how literally every single thing we do, every breath and every minuscule movement, is a case of parting and moving matter. It all causes some kind of friction in the universe. We simply HAVE to. And that friction scales up and up and up into actual human relationships and then past that into group dynamics and then group relationships and then societies and cultures. And it’s all a case of friction. Friction of ideas and beliefs and actions. To be, you must do. (“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” - Blaise Pascal) But no one knows what they’re doing, so we just do what seems right. It feels right or you think it’s right. And eventually the path of your right is going to intersect with the path of someone else’s right and we all know two things can’t be in the same place in the space-time continuum, so action must come to pass. The friction’s the issue, no matter the issue.
At some point in playing this song, Robbie started riffing on the lyrics and creating this Taking Back Sunday-style call-and-response narrative. I can’t speak for him on his meaning or intention, but I’ve always loved the way his words intertwine with what I’m saying but in a more aggressive, less purple way. I like to think of it as my character working to rationalize his decision making, while Robbie’s character is coming from a place of emotion based on the actions of the other person. Having to face the direct consequence of your actions while you stand there and try to explain yourself in increasingly abstract and indirect ways. I do know that the guitar lines he wrote for that song are two of his earliest forms of brilliant lead guitar playing and harmony within the arrangement. From the first time he played that part at the end of the chorus, I haven’t been able to hear or play the song without imagining those notes in there. I also love the bouncing bass line and the improvised bass slides that Matt came up with in the studio for this song. They add a nice fun character and help anchor the more country/folksy elements that could’ve easily been lost in the punk band instrumentation. Zach is, of course, a great drummer, and the rolling toms in the bridge were a totally unexpected and enjoyable touch.