first round
(10) LCD Soundsystem, “All My Friends”
dusted
(7) Dirty Vegas, “Days Go By”
266-95
and will play in the second round
Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the song/essay with the most votes at the end of the game. If there is a tie, we will play a one-hour overtime (and repeat until we have a winner). Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/8/24.
And Still I Think of You: scott dickensheets on dirty vegas’s “days go by”
1.
Hell no I don’t dance. Not a step, not a twitch. I should be upfront about that in an essay like this. For one thing, most zombies have better flow than I can muster. I’m wide-bodied and ungainly; were I to shake my groove thing, it’d be like Godzilla swinging his tail: people fleeing in the streets, buildings going down, the military called in; pandemonium. And the less we dwell on my overachieving sweat glands the better. Maybe most important, and sorry to drag you into my introvert’s mind-wiring, but I’m simply not capable—emotionally, psychologically, maybe even spiritually—of cutting loose enough to bust even the most discreet move. Can’t be done. So it makes sense that I’m not into dance music, either. Fist bump to my man Gideon Lewis-Kraus, a writer who once described Skrillex’s work as “a computerized raccoon fight,” thus inadvertently providing me with a handy dismissal of the whole oontz-oontz industrial complex.
So why am I here? Because there’s this one house number, “Days Go By” by Dirty Vegas (2002): an insistent bass throbbing under a sibilant synth and some fast hi-hat work, nudging along some not especially sophisticated lyrics about loss and regret. I don’t know if that description usefully sets it apart from a hundred other songs—just by Moby, let alone the whole genre. I’ll leave that to the taxonomists. What I do know is that this song possesses the exact coordinates for my brain’s melancholy receptors. “Days go by and still I think of you”? Damn right I do, even though the meaning of “you” shifts all the time and doesn’t really match the song’s. Since I first heard it 22 years ago, “Days” regularly emerges from my memory, cuts through my headspace murk of old Dylan lyrics, Bill Frisell riffs, and the marching band from “Tusk,” and earworms a day or two, always bringing a tag cloud of youthful faces, once-vital experiences, and irretrievable time. I haven’t thought about it much until this Danceness thing came up. Then it was like, okay, song, fine. Let’s see what we’ve got here.
2.
They were reportedly going to call themselves Dirty Harry, after the Clint Eastwood movie, but a band’s got to know its legal limitations, so members Steve Smith, Ben Harris, and Paul Harris (no relation) settled on Dirty Vegas. Excellent choice! An adjective like dirty can do a lot of connotative work when paired to the name of a city notorious for mobsters, gamblers, nightlife sleestaks, sex workers, grifters, cartoon architecture, Hunter Thompson, and enough tawdry glitz to go around. I live in a suburb outside of Las Vegas proper, nowhere near the dirty parts, but I get it. Anyone asks me where I’m from, I always say Vegas.
The trio recorded “Days Go By” in 2001. According to a breathless MTV News writeup from May 2002, it popped during the band’s first day in the studio.
Most of us were introduced to the song when it soundtracked a popular commercial for the 2003 Mitubishi Eclipse. In a carload of attractive young people, the woman riding shotgun begins popping in her seat while the car swings through glowing nighttime urban scenes. As for the song’s quotient of sadness—“days when I couldn’t live my life without you”—it’s easily subsumed in the aesthetics of slick hucksterism. Hey, just like Vegas.
By contrast, the official video doubles down on the lyrics’ sense of loss. On an ungentrified urban sidewalk in L.A. (but which could pass for certain parts of Las Vegas), an aging man in a suit and battered orange Chucks spreads out some cardboard, bumps “Days Go By” on his boombox, and begins street-dancing.
You are still a whisper on my lips
A feeling at my fingertips
That's pulling at my skin ...
He’s not dancing to entertain the tiny audience that accrues, of which he appears unaware, and not for the joy of it, either, as none is evident on his face. He’s lost in a private reverie of time. The watchers recount his story as if it’s urban legend, while the video flashes back and forth between his younger self, his moves fluid and daring, and his stiffer, age-haunted present. In his youth, the guy was in love with a young woman, she who gave him the orange shoes—but he was more in love with dancing, and she eventually left him. Now, on the same day every year, he returns to this spot, battered shoes taped up, and dances sunup to sundown to bring her back.
You leave me when I'm at my worst
A feeling as if I've been cursed
Bitter cold within ...”
The song winds down, the tiny crowd disperses, and he experiences a fleeting vision of his lost love before gathering his stuff and leaving, silhouetted by the setting sun.
Melancholy, all right. But not enough to prevent “Days Go By” from reaching number 14 on the Billboard Hot 100.
3.
“How we dance is connected to who and what we are,” the philosopher Alva Noë writes in last year’s The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are. “... it is hardly possible to enumerate all the different goals, needs, and curiosities that motivate people on the public dance floor ...”
I want to say that what motivates me to avoid the public dance floor are these calcium deposits I call knees, but that’s just me being glib. The truth is closer to something else Noë writes:
Our dancing is at odds with planning and deliberation. To the degree to which we excel, we do so by letting ourselves go; we act without undue attention to what we are doing.
Noë might as well be subtweeting my ironclad, innate refusal to loosen my self-control. That’s more or less an original factory setting, by the way, not a lifestyle choice. (It’s also why I don’t often drink and have never used drugs.) The situation doesn’t matter, either. I live in a large and boisterous house, a crossroads place for kids, grandkids, friends. “Play That Funky Music, White Boy” comes on, there will be dancing. Guess who revels in the vibe but always sits out?
When writer Carina del Valle Schorske, in her beautiful, deeply felt 2021 essay “Dancing Through New York in a Summer of Joy and Grief,” describes the urge to dance as “a physical craving for spiritual catharsis,” I totally grasp the truth of it. And when she extols the effect of dancing as “the beauty of not knowing what happens next, the beauty of messing up and just like, you’re still going,” I get it, but I can’t do it.
“You need to cut loose,” my wife often tells me, “you shouldn’t care what other people think,” and I’ve never been able to explain that, for reasons I can’t afford a therapist to clarify, I experience the social gaze not as a bundle of individual (and therefore dismissable) subjective views, but as one integrated, pitiless, perfectly objective judgment of what I am in the world. And what I don’t wanna be in the world is an old man who looks like he’s simultaneously conducting an orchestra and stomping on bugs while also experiencing convulsions. Truly, I’d rather not be seen at all.
But look, I don’t want to push this too far, present myself as some kind of wallflower at life. I get out, I meet people; I can be witty among others, and have good table manners. And I’m a journalist, a profession del Valle Schorske compares to dancing, both of them “forms of structured improvisation for stepping out into a world full of potentially hostile strangers.” I’ve been at it nearly 40 years for precisely that reason—to access people, spaces, and social milieus I’d otherwise never encounter. The difference between journalism and dancing is that I get to just stand around and take notes, and the social gaze moves elsewhere. It’s much easier on the knees, too.
4.
Days go by and still I think of you, and by you I mean—what? (Note to my wife: Not some lost girlfriend.) For a ruminative sort like me, the specific sadness mentioned in the lyrics matters far less than its atmosphere of regret and squandered time, which pings my own inventory of loss. When I chose this song, I had in mind people like my college friend Cheryl, a true eccentric who befriended the homeless on Las Vegas Boulevard, and later died in a one-car rollover; or my youngest brother, who died a few years ago after a long limbo in the soulless clutches of American healthcare. When “Days Go By” first hit the airwaves, my sons were just old enough that it reminded me of all their fleeting childhood moments—birth scenes, playing in the park, the way all three when little would end up in the same bed, sleeping in a pile like kittens—that I was aching to hold on to but couldn’t. Maybe I’ll write about, I thought. I mean, the kitten-pile thing is damn adorable.
But shit has a way of always getting realer. In the months since the Danceness lottery, our family has been rocked by two more wrenching deaths; as I write this, my mom, at 83, has just stopped her cancer treatments, surrendering to the inevitable, and now all these losses, old and new, are cascading into something more than maybe a melancholy dance track can be a vehicle for.
I didn’t intend to park that much heartache so late in this piece, but that’s life, always at odds with planning and deliberation, and, anyway, fuck it, it’s 4 a.m., I’m listening to “Days Go By” for probably the 75th time, and that’s just how it’s emerging. If you think that’s depressing, here’s a John Berger quote I’ve been carrying around since I became eligible for AARP: "The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying." Like, whoa. For a man who never feels like dancing, I really don’t feel like dancing.
But why not? In her essay, del Valle Schorske notes that in medieval Europe, a “dancing mania” flourished in the shadow of the Black Death, and she quotes Philippe de Félice, a French historian: “Eras of greatest material and moral distress seem to be those during which people dance most.” Okay, I’ll take it under advisement. (<—I’m being glib again.)
5.
There’s a very different, third version of “Days Go By” you can find on YouTube: live, acoustic, stripped down, just Steve Smith on guitar backed by Eva Walsh’s evocative violin. His voice isn’t processed; there is no beat. It’s a song, not a studio production. No one will be dancing to this.
With its plaintive Amercana authenticity, you’d think I’d love this version; I mean, I’m a Springsteen guy, I’m getting sentimental in my old age, and this version kinda evokes the gestalt of that Berger quote.
And yet. In the original, something about the interplay between the doleful lyrics and the beat, which is apparently potent enough to get attractive young people dancing in their cars, just feels more right (to me). It’s more urgent and contemporaneous than the ostensibly rawer, more emotive acoustic version. del Valle Schorske might suggest that’s due to a joyful urge to “make our human needs known against the electronic grind” of our constantly technologizing culture. I suspect that the dopamine-release prompted by the beat deepens and rounds out my perception of the song’s melancholy, making it feel like a more layered, sophisticated experience.
Or maybe I’m just overthinking it, and should just acquiesce to truth expressed by a tweet I once saw: “I’d much rather get fucked up on a work of art than understand it.”
Lotta people must’ve concurred, as “Days go By” won the 2003 Grammy for Best Dance Recording.
6.
Days go by and still I think of you—and by you I mean me. This is throwing it waaaay back, but if I’m doing The Verve’s math correctly, and I really am a million different people from one day to the next, then 16.7 billion iterations of myself ago—which certainly feels accurate—I danced. In public. Of my own free will. I was 16ish, stranded at some sort of teen night in a church in dirty ol’ Vegas, and there was a dance contest. For some reason, I agreed to participate. I even improvised a signature move: In the midst of my freeform flailing, I’d periodically shimmy down to my knees, twitching and shaking the whole way, then arch back until my head touched the floor. Watch this, people! The other kids dug it, too, as I recall. That may have been the last time any physical act I undertook elicited appreciative oohs and ahhs, and was probably the last time I tried.
Four decades later, when I reconstruct the scene in the holodeck of my mind, that young dude—so utterly lost in time it feels wrong to use the first-person—is flat-out letting go, giving in to the moment, working up a sweat, and wearing embarrassing bell-bottoms (it was the ’70s)—and is self-conscious about exactly none of it. Noë again: “We just dance. ... dancing is the spontaneous expression of skill and personal style,” and if this 16-year-old clearly hasn’t much of either, he seems okay with that.
You go, kid. Don’t let me stop you.
Now a freelance writer and editor based in Henderson, Nevada, Scott Dickensheets has worked all over the Las Vegas media scene: most recently as a daily newsletterist for City Cast Las Vegas, and before that as features editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, deputy editor of Desert Companion magazine, editor in chief of the local alt-weeklies CityLife and the Las Vegas Weekly, and as an editor and columnist at the Las Vegas Sun. His first book, I Blame My Parents for My Happy Childhood, will probably never be written—but he’s thinking about it. He lives with several cats and dogs named after Colorado towns he can’t afford to move to.
Dance Music for Grownups: kate carmody on “All My Friends” by LCD Soundsystem
We put Sound of Silver on the record player in the living room. We dance with Corky St. Clair, our shih poo, between us. We are in a band together and play weird, dancey synthy songs inspired by bands like LCD Soundsystem. When the needle wanders into the grooveless black space, I raise it, replace the first Sound of Silver record with the second, and carefully drop the needle on “All My Friends.” Before I moved in with my husband I thought about getting a record player—I have fond memories of dancing to Donna Summer and Michael Jackson with my family in our sunroom—but I didn’t have room in past apartments and instead opted for the best portable Bluetooth speaker I could afford.
Now in our house in North Denver, we regularly listen to records and give them to each other on holidays. This past Christmas we gave each other Rupa, EGS, Can, Funkadelic, and Fever Ray. After I moved in back in 2017, he gave me every LCD record for my birthday and we listened to them all from start to finish. I like listening to an album all the way through. I like watching the needle go round and round, thinking about all the instruments and voices pressed into a sleek sheet of vinyl. I like watching the needle wobble from the old, uneven floors beneath the console but not enough to make it skip a beat. Dancing too close to the console is another story. That’ll make the needle jump with us, so it’s best to keep some distance.
When I hear the piano start on “All My Friends,” I ask my husband if it would be hard to play those same keys over and over for over seven minutes. After years of listening, I’m well aware of the song’s length. “It would take practice,” he says motioning the keys with his fingers. My husband’s a musician. In addition to our band together, he plays in the psychedelic cumbia band Don Chicharrón and the rock band Eric vs the Demons in Denim. He taught me to pay attention to things I never noticed in songs. I’m not sure I ever really heard the bass until the tenth time he said, “How awesome is this bassline?!” It’s through those lessons that I hear this song about aging and friendship, build with accompaniment.
*
It’s 2009. We go back to my friend’s house after dominating the jukebox at Barry’s or Don’s or Candlelight. We crack open beers, though we probably don’t need another, and my friend shuffles through songs while everyone shouts requests. We dance to Hot Chip, !!!, Katy Perry, Beyoncé, always Nelly—we may live in Denver, but there are too many of us from St. Louis to pass him over —and always, always LCD. He plays “All My Friends,” and inevitably, someone starts playing air piano. Another friend bounces their knees up and down like they’re doing a plyometric exercise before a big game. We inch in closer to each other. Some of us swivel our hips, some shake our heads back and forth, a couple have jumped on the couch, we all move together to the rhythm.
My first memories of “All My Friends” and LCD Soundsystem are of dancing. In my forty-three years on this planet, few times have brought me as much joy as those spent dancing with friends. I’ve always been lucky to find friends whose dancing is one part grooving to the beat, one part singing the lyrics we know, and one part making each other laugh. In high school we stuffed pillows under our shirts as we danced to Ace of Base’s “All That She Wants;” in college, we spent way too much money on one of those claw arcade games until I won the Mr. Magoo doll that we desperately needed to prance with around the dancefloor; and after, we use whatever’s in each other’s houses that we think can accompany our routine. Here’s a hot tip, friends: a broom or Swiffer Sweeper can serve as a microphone, dance partner, or guitar. If you extend it into the crowd, watch how quickly someone grabs the other end and a limbo line forms. I’ve got lots of moves but limber limbo moves are not in my bag. I was, in fact, kicked out of gymnastics right before I conquered the back bend, so I relish in my duties as the limbo bar holder. At one friend’s wedding when there was no broom in sight, I picked up a slice of pie and learned that anything could be a calling card for limbo as long as your arm’s extended.
I love dancing. Dancing is an act of communion and personal expression. I like to think that at every moment of the day, there are people all over the planet dancing. You could throw on music right now, and someone across the globe would be dancing with you. If you are in the middle of your workday, surrounded by coworkers or students, this may sound preposterous. But go ahead and try it. I’m willing to bet you can get at least one person to join you.
Dancing is in our DNA. When we hear music, we want to move. When we dance, we are connecting. We are kinetic energy.
*
For most of his life, James Murphy, the founding member of LCD Soundsystem, admits in interviews, he was never a dancer. He says he was in bands throughout his teens and often mentions how uncool he was. As a kid, he struggled with making friends because he was uptight and controlling. When he moved to New York City, he studied writing at NYU and played in a band with another writer. He dropped out of school to focus on the band full-time, but his band never found their footing in the nineties indie rock scene, and he quit playing music. Murphy was turned off by the sameness of indie rock. “Almost everybody in a band wanted to be cool and feel cool,” he tells Sound Opinions. “They wanted to think certain things about themselves, and if you took that away, what was the point?” There’s still a whiff of bitterness when he says this. While he quit music because he was uninspired by the scene, he’s aware that his personality also got in the way of successfully collaborating with others.
After unplugging the amp on his indie rock, Murphy shifted his focus to sound engineering and built a studio with the help of some friends in the business. It was musician and producer Tim Goldsworthy and DJ David Holmes who introduced Murphy to dance music when they came to New York from the UK to work in his studio. Murphy started going out with them and having fun, which was, as he tells Red Bull Music Academy, “anathematic to my indie rock nineties, which was going out and being judgmental.” But he remained loyal to the indie rock self-serious, too-cool-for-school sentiment, which meant no dancing.
There is social risk in dancing, which is perhaps why so many dance-songwriters remind us how they feel while dancing, instruct us about how to move, or command us to “Get up!” or “Get down!”. Others tell us stories, reminding us why we love dancing. Too often we let our fear of embarrassment get in the way of what comes naturally. Some people need a little help getting out of their heads. For Murphy, ecstasy was the tool to pry open his indie rocker shell and expose a side of him that he didn’t know existed. Once he was dancing and having fun, Murphy realized, as he says in Meet Me in the Bathroom, “This is me dancing. This isn’t the drug dancing. This is the drugs stopping myself from stopping myself from dancing.”
This experience of letting loose led to him starting DFA Records and LCD Soundsystem. “I realized that making people dance had a point that had nothing to do with art,” Murphy tells Red Bull Academy. “It’s like food; if they’re not eating it, then you’ve screwed it up. If they’re not dancing, you’re just not doing a good job.” Murphy didn’t abandon everything he loved about rock-and-roll. He didn’t suddenly become a super laid-back person. Instead, he recognized that with the basic goal of making people move, he could “calm down and stop wondering if what [he] was doing was good or worthwhile;” he could borrow from any genre that moved him emotionally and physically; he could bend and blend genre; he could collage and kaleidoscope; he could be his whole self. Through their DFA label, Tim Goldsworthy and Murphy disrupted the indie rock and dance music worlds, producing bands such as Juan McClean, Shit Robot, and The Rapture.
When The Rapture jumped ship for a major label, Murphy fueled his frustration into making music as LCD Soundsystem. LCD’s first single, “Losing My Edge,” was inspired by Murphy hearing a twenty-something DJ play the same records that he was known for playing at DFA parties—records that audiophiles like him would be well-versed in but ones that were completely new to those in the dance music scene. Murphy realized that what made him cool could be replicated and that he was afraid of losing his cool status. Instead of getting frustrated and quitting as he did in his teens and twenties, he had the sensibility of his thirties to help him lean into his conflicted feelings.
Because Murphy was old enough to have more self-awareness, he recognized that he needed to make music on his own terms, and he needed his friends by his side. He solicited friends and drinking buddies like Nancy Whang to join his band. Soon, LCD would define the sound of the first decade of this century when rock bands were incorporating dance music and other influences as they did in the seventies and eighties.
With the success of LCD’s self-titled debut album, Murphy returned to the studio in rural Massachusetts where he recorded the first album determined to make an even better one. With the recent passing of his therapist, he was ready to dig into more difficult themes. He covered the walls of the studio with silver fabric and tin foil, coating warm wooden tones with reverberations to record Sound of Silver.
“All My Friends” is the Sound of Silver sequel to “Losing My Edge.” “Losing My Edge” interrogates his fear through a cheeky exploitation that equally skewers music snobs like himself and the next generation of DJs, whereas “All My Friends” is an intimate conversation with himself. Murphy’s vocal melodies are the most complex part of the song while the rest of the instrumentation slowly builds with repetition. The four-on-the-floor beat provides the box for him to oscillate between living in the moment and returning to his friends. The guitar and synthesizer comfort his crooning or perhaps accentuate it. His vocals command the most attention and depth. His lyrics are essayistic.
In “Losing My Edge” his feelings are masked with humor, but in “All My Friends” he examines his tendency to use self-deprecating humor as a defense mechanism. He has achieved the level of fame and notoriety that he’s wanted his whole life and he has fun playing music with his friends all over the world, but he also has friends at home who have settled down. He wonders whether this lifestyle is sustainable as he gets older. After he sings, “i wouldn’t trade one stupid decision— / for another 5 years of life,”[*] he questions the sincerity of that statement. The essayist Philip Lopate says, “The spectacle of baring the naked soul is meant to awaken the sympathy of the reader, who is apt to forgive this essayist’s self-absorption in return for the warmth of his or her candor. Some vulnerability is essential.” In the hands of a twenty-year-old, contemplating if he is getting too old for the rockstar lifestyle may come off as disingenuous, but Murphy approaches it with the experience and realism of a man in his thirties, which allows any aging listener to empathize.
*
I put on my Bose over-ear headphones. The ones I impulse purchased at the airport kiosk when I realized I’d forgotten my much cheaper ones at home. The ones I couldn’t afford but convinced myself I needed because how else would I signal to the guy in 16B that I was unavailable for mid-air chatter?
I tap on “All My Friends” and slide in my socks across the hardwood floor to Corky. And so it starts, a simple piano melody with two imperfect notes repeating. It’s humanity apparent. As it chugs along, I hear one key trying to catch up until it’s in sync with the other. Over and over it chases that union. When the drums and bass come in, they support the fragile composition. I shimmy my shoulders with the piano. A minute later, I’m tired, so I stop to sing, “that’s how it starts / we go back to your house.” I point to Corky, who tilts his head and wags his tail. I continue singing, slide over to the kitchen, and open the dishwasher. I’m dance-cleaning the dishes and thinking about all our late-night dance parties. How we gather closer and closer, dancing in a circle, shouting with James Murphy “and if the sun comes up—if the sun comes up— / if the sun comes up and i still don’t want to stagger home / then it’s the memory of our betters / that are keeping us on our feet.”
It was 2015 and I was listening to “All My Friends.” I was 34, single. It was a Friday night, and I’d opted to stay in. I paid too much in rent. But I was the happiest I’d been since my years-long tumultuous relationship ended. My ex didn’t know where I lived, and I had truly wiped off most of the muck of our relationship on the blue carpet outside my apartment door (the one he sat on while begging me to let him in), leaving only a tiny bit to remind me I was better off alone.
I liked living alone. I liked singing to Corky loudly in my apartment, hoping my neighbors didn’t hear me. I liked snuggling with him on the couch and reading or watching TV. I liked putting on socks just so I could slide across my hardwood floors to do cool dance moves, sometimes with music, sometimes without. I liked pacing in my apartment, twirling my hair while thinking without anyone interrupting me. Weekend nights, yes, going out with friends, but also staying in, helped me find myself again.
But this time, what I thought would be a song to remind me of fun with friends while I cleaned the kitchen took a different turn. This time in the kitchen, when I heard: “you spend the first five years trying to get with the plan / and the next five years / trying to be with your friends again,” I felt like I had accidentally bit the side of my mouth while I chewed on nostalgia. The urgency in Murphy’s voice and his honest, vulnerable lyrics invited me to let my fears reveal themselves.
I pressed the repeat icon in Spotify, wandered over to the couch, and laid down. Corky hopped up and climbed on top of me, resting his head on my chest. I scratched the top of his little head and petted his soft black fur. I stretched my other arm across my eyes so there’d be nothing but the song. I listened to “All My Friends” repeatedly until I wasn’t thinking about dancing with my friends:
you spend the first five years trying to get with the plan
and the next five years
trying to be with your friends again
After one of our numerous breakups, I remember saying to my ex, “You wasted my good years.” He was almost six years younger than me. He had plenty of time. But when I said, “You wasted my good years,” I really meant, “I wasted my good years.” I knew the third go wouldn’t work, and I knew I was only staying with him because I was afraid of starting over.
The song was playing over and over but those were the only lines I heard. I came apart. I started crying, but I didn’t remove my arm from my eyes. I let my tears soak into my sweatshirt and stayed in the darkness, tapping my toes with the downbeat of the kick.
To tell the truth, I wasn’t where I wanted to be. I was never one of those people whose ultimate goal was to be married with kids, but I didn’t like the worry that everyone else had their shit together. Maybe it was the approaching holidays, but I was already dreading hearing friends and family comment about how they wish they had time to go to concerts and have fun like they did before having kids.
oh if the trip and the plan come apart in your hands
you can turn it on yourself you ridiculous clown
Murphy’s words bounced off the silver of the studio and rang in my ears. When my years-long abusive relationship ended, my friends were very supportive, and I took it as an opportunity to purge myself of the trauma. For weeks, I’d tell anyone willing to listen. I thought telling people would make me feel better. In some ways, releasing it from my body did. Soon, I grew tired of being treated like a wound, and instead of crying about it, I morphed it into a punchline. In a culture obsessed with trauma porn, joking about how I was Maury Povich’s dream guest was a lot easier than confronting shame. Eventually, when I started writing again, I vowed never to let another person consume my thoughts and creative energy again.
I swear, after the sixth or so time hearing Murphy belt, “where are your friends tonite?” I heard his voice crack and the silver walls crumble into a ball of aluminum. I was the leaves and twigs left in the street after the street sweeping machine came through. My friends tossed the dead and broken bits in the air and somehow I was alive again. If I could see all my friends tonight, I would thank them. If I could see all my friends tonight, I could get out of my head. If I could see all my friends tonight, I would remember that this song is meant for moving.
*
I still like listening to “All My Friends” with friends and on my own. I still listen on my old Bose headphones. I still slide around in socks. When I play it now, I think about that time in my apartment and realize I’m in the in-between once again, looping like the galloping piano, fighting to get in sync.
I started trying to have a baby when I was too old. Someone told me they were surprised I didn’t get pregnant like all the other millennials who did during the pandemic. But I wasn’t ready. We hadn’t even gone on our honeymoon and I’d just graduated from my MFA program. I was supposed to be jumping into being a writer, not a mother. By the time I decided that I’d rather have tried than not tried and always wonder, the miscarriage rate was over twenty percent. After over a year of trying and two miscarriages, my OB/GYN recommended IVF, which I learned would have been easier at 40 instead of 41. One year later, the time I had blocked off to work on my book was filled with appointments and shots and trying to keep my head straight with the hormones. Then the waiting and disappointment and confusion about what steps to follow, what any of the jargon and numbers mean, and how we’re going to pay for everything.
I’m afraid that this will be yet another thing started late that never comes to fruition. I’m afraid I’ll never finish the books I’m working on. James Murphy may have been a late bloomer, but what do you call a late bloomer who has never bloomed? I’m still emerging. I’m constantly in a state of becoming. I realize that instead of growing up, I’m growing old. It’s not that I want to go back. I just don’t want to be behind. I just want to move in time. If I could see all my friends tonight, I could get out of my head.
This is what I think about when I’m lonely and anxiety plays puppet master. This is what I think about when I feel the frantic hits of Pat Mahoney’s hi-hats and what I feel like when Nancy Whang’s fingers are going to fall off from playing the same keys for what seems like an eternity. I’m not looking for sympathy here. I’m saying this because “All My Friends” makes me nostalgic for dance parties in my younger years and gets me to reflect on my current fears. It’s a song that ages with you.
I think each of us is like the one-chord progression. Advancing at a steady, slightly wavering rhythm. What makes our lives more interesting is who we choose to accompany us. I text my friends and ask them to share thoughts and memories of “All My Friends” and dance parties. One friend says, “LCD is dance music for grownups.” Another sends a video of us dancing on New Year's Eve last year. Right at the crescendo a friend slides on her knees through our dancing circle and across the floor in her silver sequined pants. I laugh watching it and even harder as I read the comments that follow.
*
to tell you the truth—this could be the last time
“I really wanted to end it while I was making Sound of Silver,” Murphy tells Chuck Klosterman in Shut Up and Play the Hits, the documentary of LCD’s farewell show at Madison Square Garden in 2011. He says he hinted at it in the lyrics to “All My Friends.” Touring and appeasing the record label had taken a toll on his physical and mental health. After kids, after making movies and coffee and the world’s greatest sound system, after David Bowie told Murphy to do what made him uncomfortable when Murphy told him he was making music again, after almost five years, LCD reunited.
I’ve been to three LCD Soundsystem shows since they came “Back from the Dead” as they said on their concert poster, and each time they ended the night with “All My Friends.” The focus on the rotating giant disco ball replaced with red moody lights shining on the band, my friends and I, several of the thousands of fans, arms in the air belting the lyrics with LCD like it’s the last time, the memory of our betters keeping us on our feet.
When my dad’s friend was dying, he took every opportunity he could get to tell his friends he loved them. “I love you,” he’d say while golfing. “I love you,” he’d say after dinner. So if I don’t say this enough, I love you, friends. All of you. Friends from home, friends from college, friends here, writer friends, I feel lucky to be your friend.
Photo taken by the author at the 2016 Panorama Music Festival.
Kate Carmody, pie limbo innovator, lives in Denver, Colorado with her husband and dog. The three of them are in the band Dadafacer. Find her work in Fence, Electric Literature, Porter House Review, and The Rumpus, among others. She encourages you to support local music. Here’s a start: Don Chicharrón, Eric Vs The Demons in Denim, Body, Language Barrier, Bellhoss, Self Help, Tyler Breuer, Jackie Zubrzycki, Alright Alright, Faceman, Los Mocochetes, The Xisme, Austen Carroll & the Better Neighbors, Townie, Bolonium, Bud Bronson & The Goodtimers, High Plains Honky, Many Places, Zealot, Conductora, Bluebook, Funk Hunk, Ritmo Cascabel, Nikbo, and Uniflora.