Hear Me Out: LCD Soundsystem created the greatest song of all time with just two notes
Two notes: that’s how it starts. Played imperfectly and incessantly for well over a minute. The long-awaited arrival of James Murphy’s voice surely promises some solace. Tales of staggering home after making stupid decisions, locating more drugs and longing for old friends. But sitting just beneath his outpouring of longing, digging in relentlessly, those two notes. Harsh and unsympathetic, a constant reminder that nostalgia can only be felt for things that have already passed. That’s how it ends, too. Seven-and-a-half minutes later.
It, of course, is LCD Soundsystem’s 2007 single, ‘All My Friends’. Released as the second single from their second album, Sound of Silver, it’s a song about partying and pretending, about longing for the days of your youth and the friends that got you through them. These themes were all too familiar to Murphy, who had shown an interest in ageing from the moment LCD Soundsystem debuted with ‘Losing My Edge’, but this was his most unrestrained nostalgia trip yet.
Lyrically, ‘All My Friends’ follows the style Murphy had coined for himself on that first LCD Soundsystem single. With a tone that veers between self-indulgence and self-hatred, he rambles about the crowded parties he attended in his youth and longs for them amidst the more serious life he leads now. “You spent the first five years trying to get with the plan,” he sings, “And the next five years trying to be with your friends again.”
Penning lyrics out of his longing to still be considered cool was already a tried and tested formula for Murphy. The lyrics were guaranteed to become like gospel to the indie kids of the 2000s, but where LCD Soundsystem really took a risk with ‘All My Friends’ was the instrumentation. Repetition was always a part of their dance-driven sound, but to drag two notes out into eight minutes was a new level of ambition.
It shouldn’t have worked. One or two minutes in, the relentless repetition of one or two notes should have become unbearably annoying. And on your very first listen to ‘All My Friends’, it just might have. But with the second listen, and the third listen, and the time you heard it at your friend’s house party or stumbled upon it in a festival tent or at YES, it becomes more entrancing than irritating.
Initially, those shoddy piano keys contain within them all of the urgency, hope and chaos of youth that Murphy longs for. They’re more akin to a dance number than an indie tune. But as they persist for seven minutes or so, building in fervour and feeling, they begin to lose some of that rose-tinted sheen. They’re never overly grating, but they do come to reflect Murphy holding onto something that he has no real choice but to let go of.
The statements he strings together in between chords detail that struggle in a way that is undeniably anthemic. Lines like “I wouldn’t trade one stupid decision for another five years of life” are just begging listeners to sing along, to join Murphy in a chorus of longing. His words garner intensity as the repetition does the same.
As the song reaches its climax, Murphy repeatedly asks us, “Where are your friends tonight?” Those piano keys become louder than ever before, as if daring us to try to answer him. As much as we may long for the sweeter, simpler times of partying and watching the sun come up, most of us can’t. Though we may share Murphy’s longing to see all of his friends tonight, that feels like a distant memory in full-fledged adulthood.
Somehow, LCD Soundsystem had created an undisputed indie dance anthem with just two notes. In fact, they had created one of the greatest songs of all time. As Murphy’s nostalgic longing builds, scattered with specificities and universal experiences all at once, so, too, does the instrumentation that accompanies them. Those two notes become far more than clunky piano playing. They become the ever-mounting nostalgia of growing up.
Ironically, the song also seems to have become an anthem for the moments it so desperately longs for. Crowds of people at Glastonbury banded together with their friends to scream along to the words, and the same happens at house parties, at club nights, and even on car journeys around the world. And though there are only two notes to accompany those complex feelings, those glimpses of euphoria, that’s enough.
