Friendship Tickets

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 guitarin 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. Lyrically, Caveman Wakes Up covers familiar Friendship ground—the sacred is profaned and the profane sanctified.