THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Friendship’s Caveman Wakes Up is an album for sleeping and waking, walking and driving, hunting and fishing, and for loitering outside a roadhouse on the haunted tundra. It is OK in elevators but not great for dinner.
On Caveman Wakes Up, the band’s historically capacious definition of country music grows wider still. Shambolic guitars are offset by flute pads. Bleary poetry is set against a Motown rhythm section. A song about Jerry Garcia and First Lady Betty Ford fades out with a drum solo, It’s as if Talk Talk came from a dingy Philadelphia basement and were fronted by James Tate.
Songwriter Dan Wriggins’ ragged baritone cuts through 11 murky, swirling country-rock songs with profound lyrical substance and sincerity. Like an alarm clock incorporated into the edge of a dream, Caveman Wakes Up belongs equally to the conscious and subconscious mind, fraught with background, steeped in reference and experimentation, delivered casually and as a dire warning, dedicated, above all, to music’s creative soul.
Friendship’s roots trace back to Yarmouth, Maine, the small town where Wriggins, Peter Gill and Michael Cormier-O’Leary grew up. They took their name from Friendship, Maine, about an hour up the coast from Yarmouth, but that’s neither here nor there. They moved to Philly in 2015, and the band has expanded and contracted since, releasing several EPs followed by 2017’s Shock Out Of Season and 2019’s Dreamin’. Wriggins also released the solo EP Mr. Chill last year.”
