No New Friends - The New Sad Disco Single

No New Friends is out everywhere today. It’s wild to me that it’s finally here, in your hands and off my hard drives. I recorded the instrumental for this song years ago (2022), but I wasn’t able to fully realize the song until much later. I had been working on Sad Disco as a concept, an idea, for a year at least, but the blend of moods, the recipe for this new genre didn’t always seem to set. Even after writing and editing and reworking, many of the songs still seemed fluid, formless, unstable. The sounds I threw at the wall just wouldn’t stick, no matter how many times I rewrote them, and with each new version, I couldn’t help but think of the line from David Bowie’s “Life On Mars”:

“But the film is a saddening bore / Because I wrote it ten times or more.”

And then this one came together, all at once, sometime in 2024. I had moved all my things into a storage unit and moved out of Los Angeles, and I found myself living in the same kind of limbo where these songs existed. Between places, I kept putting on this instrumental I had recorded years earlier, and something began to take shape over it. I recorded one melody, then another. I added some harmonies, and I added some more harmonies. I rearranged the song, and I did something that all my songwriting professors would have failed me for: I wrote this song with no chorus.

But something worked. I was wrestling with a feeling, from the start of the song to the end of it, and it wasn’t a feeling that fit an anthem. Life, at the time, didn’t feel like it had a middle, a center, around which I could organize every verse. There was no concept I wanted to sing three times before the song was over. But the feeling was there, the genre, the mood, it all fit somehow.

It was the exact sound I had been imagining.

I played it for one of you right after I recorded all of the lyrics and I thought ‘this one will stick.’ It felt like a song that wouldn’t be mistaken for anyone else. And it’s out, at long last.

Lyrics

My fairweather friend
Where did you go?
I don’t recall falling, but
Everything’s broke

Fairweather friend
Please pick up the phone
I’m trying to call you but nobody’s home
There’s nothing left of my old life
It fell apart and I can’t hide that I’m
Down on my luck
With nowhere to go
If you don’t answer I’ll
Wait here on hold

Here on the line
On the line…
On the line…
On the line…

We used to have good times
Good Times
Or was it just the good times?

Send the king’s horses
All the king’s men
They couldn’t put my life
Together again
What didn’t break went to the repo man
Said there’s no such thing as a fairweather debt

Such good times in paradise
The summer sun there feels so nice
Then down goes the ship
It’s rock bottom again
I wave goodbye to my
Fairweather friends

You said - 
“Call me when you need me, 
I know living isn’t easy
I’m here if you need a pick me up”
So I call, listen to the ringing
My lonely heart is singing
Where’d you go when I needed you?

No new friends I think I’ve had enough
(Where’d you go when I needed you baby, where’d you go?)
No new friends I think I’ve had enough
Yeah you left me for what?

No new friends I think I’ve had enough
Keep my energy up
No new friends I think I’ve had enough
When I’m losing it all,
They’re gone, they’re gone