Friendship / Natalie Jane Hill / Krill 2 (solo)

Doors open at 8PM; performance begins at 9PM. This is music for sleeping, waking, walking, driving, hunting, fishing, and lingering outside a roadside establishment on the haunted tundra. It works in elevators but not well for dinner service. Caveman Wakes Up Friendships new album marks their second release with Merge Records, expanding their historically expansive definition of country music further. Shambolic guitars are balanced by flute pads; drowsy poetry is set against a Motown rhythm section. A song about Jerry Garcia and First Lady Betty Ford fades into a drum solo, like if Talk Talk emerged from a dingy Philadelphia basement fronted by James Tate. Songwriter Dan Wriggins rough baritone cuts through eleven murky, swirling country-rock songs with deep lyrical substance and sincerity. Like an alarm clock woven into the edge of a dream, Caveman Wakes Up belongs equally to conscious and subconscious mind, filled with background material, steeped in reference and experimentation, delivered casually yet as a dire warning, dedicated above all to musics creative spirit. Over time, dedication has paid off. Friendship has become something like a reverse supergroup, where the band itself and each individual member stand centrally within an increasingly prominent scene of young folk and country musicians and songwriters. Drummer Michael Cormier OLeary leads the instrumental collective Hour and, along with bassist Jon Samuels, run 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 Gills band 2nd Grade records prolifically. Wriggins began writing the songs of Caveman Wakes Up on a downtuned classical guitar belonging to Lendermans, finishing on a barely-tuned piano in an apartment he shared with Sadurns G DeGroot. In summer 2023, Wriggins had just left the Iowa Writers Workshop, where his love for poetry and mistrust of the academic poetry world grew together. A relationship ended, and Wriggins crashed for several weeks at Lendermans and Wednesdays Karly Hartzmans home in North Carolina, where he recorded first demos of Resident Evil, All Over the World, and Love Vape. He returned to Philadelphia, and the band began working 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; organ, violin (Jason Calhoun), and flute (Adelyn Strei) were recorded by Lucas Knapp in a West Philadelphia church.