No Expectations 108: Free Association
A Taste Profile interview with Friendship’s Dan Wriggins. Plus, a 15-song playlist and a new album from Maia Friedman.
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Headline song: Friendship, “Free Association”
Thanks for being here. By the time you get this email, I’ll be in Vegas with several close friends for another year of Dead & Company at the Sphere. I went in 2024 and had a blast—my first time seeing any iteration of the Dead perform live. After that trip, I wrote a massive, kinda bonkers essay about my trip and how I became a fan of the Grateful Dead. I still think it’s one of the best newsletters I’ve written, so if you’re a newer subscriber, check it out. This time around, I’m just stoked to share that experience with my buds. You’ll still get a recap of the gig next week, but don’t expect it to be as long as the last one.
If you’re new to No Expectations, here’s a short explainer of what you signed up for. Each week, you get a wildcard main essay (often new album recommendations), a 15-song playlist, as well as updates on what I’m listening to, watching, and reading. Sometimes you’ll get an interview with an artist I love, and other times it’ll be a deep dive into one band’s discography. Since I’m a Chicago-based writer, this newsletter is very Midwest-focused. So, if you live in this city too, you’ll also receive a curated roundup of upcoming local shows to check out.
As always, you can sign up for a paid subscription or tell a friend about a band you read about here. It’s still $5 a month—the cost of one Old Style plus tip at Rainbo Club. Every bit helps, keeps this project going, and allows it to stay paywall-free. My readers’ generosity and enthusiasm are the reason I keep doing this. It’s rough out there, so I’m grateful you’re still reading and supporting this writing project. This week, it’s a Taste Profile interview with one of my favorite working songwriters. There’s only one album recommendation (well, two, if you count Friday’s Friendship LP) here this time. To be honest, I mostly just listened to the Dead to prep for the trip, but the playlist below features 15 excellent new songs.
Taste Profile: Friendship’s Dan Wriggins
Friendship has been a band for over a decade. Named after a town in Maine (three of its members grew up in the state), the now-Philly-based outfit has thrived on thoughtful and kindhearted indie rock anchored by the evocative lyricism and warbling baritone of singer Dan Wriggins. While some of their earlier releases came out on the great Chicago label Orindal, they’ve been on Merge since 2022. That year’s Love the Stranger was an early No Expectations favorite (I wrote, “[their] songs contain a gentleness and a curiosity that make their laid-back pace especially potent”). On Friday, they best themselves with their fifth full-length, Caveman Wakes Up.
It’s 11 songs of understated catharsis, wry humor, and devastating one-liners. While every single so far has been excellent (and included in past No Expectations playlists), some of my favorite tracks of the year are album cuts. There’s the thunderous clang of a guitar riff that drives “Tree of Heaven,” and the vulnerable “Love Vape,” but my favorite is the tender “Betty Ford.” Sure, it opens with a “Mission in the Rain” Grateful Dead reference, but Wriggins sings a line that’s stuck with me more than anything else this year: “I have been everyone / I’ve been so alone.”
While I’m a huge fan of Wriggins’ writing, I’m equally fond of his bandmates. Guitarist Peter Gill fronts the great power-pop band 2nd Grade, drummer Michael Cormier O’Leary is the bandleader behind the instrumental collective Hour, and bassist Jon Sameuls is a touring guitarist for MJ Lenderman. I’ve met Samuels, who also co-runs the excellent label Dear Life with founder O’Leary, a few times when Lenderman’s toured through Chicago. (Naturally, we’ve bonded and kept in touch over a love for the Dead.) Needless to say, interviewing a member of Friendship has been long overdue. And Wriggins, a published poet and an Iowa Writers Workshop MFA alum, is as perceptive and fascinating in conversation as he is on record.
Caveman Wakes Up is out Friday via Merge. They’re in Chicago at Schubas with 2nd Grade on July 9. Read on below for Wriggins’ Taste Profile interview, where he lists three formative things from his life and the three things he’s into now.
Formative interest: Ancient Egypt
We could go in a lot of different directions with this, but why did you end up picking it?
From first through third grade, I was obsessed with ancient Egypt. You know those Eyewitness Books with a bunch of pictures? They were an educational series for kids. Having a kid's imagination and ability to concentrate, I tried to learn as much as I could about the pyramids and mummies. As far as taste or formational stuff goes, it was just getting obsessed with anything that age and going so deep into something that's huge and trippy.
I remember those books very vividly. I had one on ancient Rome, a sports one, and it might have been a different series, but Star Wars, too. What specifically about ancient Egypt kind of grabbed you?
A lot of the imagery: the idea of pyramids and the Sphinx and shit like that was crazy to me. I remember hieroglyphic characters being so cool to me too. Also, all the mummification stuff, the rituals around death. Learning about as a kid, I didn't really grasp the afterlife and death thing. You'd read about mummification, how they pull the brain out through the nose to dry the body.
I suppose there's only one thing I still think about that I probably wasn't thinking about that much when I was a little kid. But I'm still so moved by the idea of these tombs. This isn't just about Egyptian art but devotional art in general, where all these huge artistic frescoes were in these tombs. It's not just that they didn't care if people saw; they were never meant to be seen by anybody. They were meant to be hidden in the tomb. It was for the gods, I guess. But just thinking about being an artist and creating things where you don't care if people dig it. You are hoping they don't. And then we've made this mistake of digging it up. It's quite sacrilegious. I'm also worried about curses and stuff that the National Geographic archaeologists are unleashing.
Formative cartoon: Gary Larson and The Far Side
Another big memory of that era is my parents reading the newspaper and showing me the cartoons. Being a kid, a lot of the jokes flew over my head. Talk to me about Gary Larson and how The Far Side influenced you.
In terms of Friendship, the first song on our last record, Love the Stranger, is called "St. Bonaventure." It opens with the line, "Still swinging on my vine / Still getting up every day." And when I wrote that, I was thinking of Larson. To me, it's the image of a Tarzan dude who is just going to work with a briefcase swinging vine-to-vine, which sounds like a Far Side strip. It might be. I also had this joke that any song or record title, I'm okay with it, if it could be a Far Side caption, and Caveman Wakes Up to me is that too.
You mentioned that his work was foundational to your sense of humor, and I know a few people who discovered your band because Joe Pera directed the music video for “Hank.” What’s been making you laugh lately?
Scrolling Instagram, you can't really lose with these old Norm MacDonald clips. He's pretty much always funny for me.
I agree. Also, it’s easy to see the through line between Larson’s absurdism and Norm’s.
It’s pretty similar. I also almost put The Three Stooges here instead of Gary Larson. They’re hit or miss, though. Sometimes they’re perfect. A lot of those alt-comics in Joe Pera’s world are great too: Conner O’Malley, Carmen Christopher—I just watched his new special and really liked it—and some podcasts like TrueAnon, Hollywood Handbook, and The Best Show with Tom Scharpling.
Formative film: Babette’s Feast
I really love this movie. Though I know it was a crucial childhood watch for many, I didn’t watch it until a few years ago on Criterion Channel. What was your first memory of it?
It might have been high school. The first time, I wasn't even crazy about it. I think I saw it again right after college. I had just moved to Philly, and that was when I was like, oh shit, I'm obsessed with this. I put it there because I think of it as my favorite movie, and it doesn't feel recent. One thing I love about it, and what I love about most things that I think are the best, it's not even about the first time experiencing it; it's more that every time I revisit it, there's new stuff that grabs me. It's so simple, yet I notice new things, I'm moved by new things, and I laugh at new things.
It’s a very meditative movie. Having the worldly French woman come in and cook this meal for these pious protestants in Denmark is a funny clash of cultures and personalities. It's ultimately very wholesome.
I think of that movie as a movie about being Protestant. And it's very meaningful to me in that way, and what's so funny about that is that it's about being Protestant, but it's also making fun of everything about Protestantism. This ridiculous denial of pleasure in all these ways that the movie makes so obvious is very stupid, and yet you love the Danish characters too. I'm a big freak for that one. A couple of other Friendship members are major chefs, and so they appreciate it even more in the culinary sense. I'm not quite as advanced in that realm.
Recent film director: Hal Hartley
When you sent over your list, you highlighted Hartley’s Trust, Simple Men, Surviving Desire, and The Unbelievable Truth. I need to catch up because I’ve only seen Trust.
Three of those are called the Long Island trilogy. They blend together, and they are my favorite. They might be the most accessible, too. The first one I watched was Henry Fool, and I didn't really dig it. And then I watched the other ones, and I was like, Okay, now I get it. Maybe I could go back and watch that one again. But it was Michael Cormier-O'Leary from Friendship who turned me on to Hal Hartley. He's a freak for it. He's corresponded with how a little bit, trying to convince him to let him score a flick, because he's still working on stuff.
Wow, that’d be amazing. Hour scoring a movie.
It'd be so sick. One thing that rules about Hal's work is the music. I was between picking Hal Hartley and the comedy show Letterkenny. I had this little theory about both of these, but it is almost even more true for Letterkenny, and of course, they're very different. But there's something I love about both of those, where a director has made this work, and then it seems like they have this rule for the actors where they all have to act a certain way, and it's a strange way. For the Hartley movies, it's very monotone, speaking fast, speaking over each other, but in a way that's so not human. What's impressive to me about it is when you think of standard hallmarks of good acting, you think of actors trying to represent reality, actors trying to be believable in a profound and nuanced way. But here, a director has clearly created it so that none of the characters are believable. They're all weird. In all the Hartley films, they're not just weird. They're all weird in the same way. It makes the movie into something else.
That's what Letterkenny is like, even more so. Everyone is so monotone, and that's where the comedy comes from. But it's just so impressive that it feels like the director skips over acting, and by doing that, you can access this other stuff. You can make a movie that's about other things with writing that, if the actors were trying to be more believable, would come off weird. But since it's a monotone thing, it's kind of funny, and it works better. There are other things I love about those flicks, too, but the thing that perhaps is the biggest, weirdest thing to me is the way all these actors are clearly doing something very specific. I chose it because I love it when anything chooses to subvert a norm like that and do something that then reaches this other symbolic stuff.
Recent band: Little Mazarn
I'm happy you chose this band. At No Expectations, I haven't written about Little Mazarn as much as I have about Carolina's project, hemlock. But they're in Little Mazarn, and I'm stoked for the new album. Tell me about your journey with this band.
I'd listened to a few recordings, but I knew that we had so many mutual friends. Their new record is coming out on Dear Life. This year, I went to SXSW and played a bunch of solo shows. Even though I had not met them, Lindsey [Verrill] and Jeff [Johnston] were our immediate Austin buddies for the festival. I just hung out with them most of the time down there, and of course, not only were they so cool, but the sets I saw were really just transformative in a way that I haven't seen in a long time. It reminds me of the first time I saw these alt-country gods that really got me into music, people like Kurt Wagner and Lambchop and Bonnie Prince Billy, who I saw play in college.
With Little Mazarn, they're never playing loud. It's all about the subtlety and the really small, thoughtful ways of playing. Of course, none of that would mean anything if the songs weren't rock solid, very well written. I have been freaking out about the new record, and, this single just came out called "The Gate,” really blew me away when I saw them all play it. Killer band. Even people who I think are really good at songwriting don't understand how to simplify something in a way that still has to be good. Little Mazarn does that.
Recent song: Bob Dylan’s "Dark Eyes"
One of the most ambitious and ridiculous but fun things I try to do every year is take a week to run through Bob Dylan’s entire catalog front-to-back. Thank you for choosing one of my alltimer Dylan songs. Love seeing Empire Burlesque shouted out in this interview series.
It's an incredible song. I think I only heard it for the first time maybe two years ago. The reason I picked it was to talk about this phenomenon more with you is this moment of, like, "Holy shit. I didn't know this one, and it's incredible." That song has a perfect melody with goofy little accompaniment, but so many incredible lines. That part in the beginning about, "I live in another world where life and death are memorized." Like, what are you talking about, Bob? Holy shit, dude! I picked it because while I consider myself a Dylan acolyte, I don't think I'm on your level, but there are so many artists who have so much incredible stuff, but it feels like I'm still scratching the surface. I'll still find something I didn't know about and be so moved by it. There's something so magical about that.
That still happens to me with Bob and with anyone with a huge discography. I saw Neil Young play with Crazy Horse last year, and he did "I'm the Ocean," which I almost put on this list. I don't think I had heard that song before he played it live that night. When he did, I was just like, "What the fuck is going on?"
I grew up listening to classic rock, but it took until I was well into adulthood to realize I was lied to about a lot of these artists. I was told to skip some of the latter-career LPs. With Bob, people said to ignore everything but Blood on the Tracks after 1969. It's so rewarding to get rid of that Rolling Stone Top 500 Albums mindset, do away with the ageism, and understand that these artists have been doing the thing for half a century, and they still got it.
If you're listening to Dylan even more than I am. Do you still have moments where you're like, Oh, I didn't really even notice that song before?
All the time! It’s been my favorite for a long time, but lately, I’ve put on Planet Waves a bunch. They're songs that feel so vulnerable for Dylan. He really sounds like he's in love on a couple of these tunes. Seeing that side of him is really compelling.
I think that’s the only one that Jake—MJ Lenderman—knows. He loves Planet Waves and basically doesn't listen to Dylan other than that.
What I listened to:
The No Expectations 108 Playlist: Apple Music // Spotify // Tidal
1. Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band, "New Threats From The Soul"
2. Racing Mount Pleasant, "Racing Mount Pleasant"
3. Teethe, "Magic Of The Sale"
4. Andy Jenkins, "Blue Mind"
5. Trace Mountains, "The Line"
6. Emily Hines, "My Own Way"
7. Cory Hanson, "Bird on a Swing"
8. Friendship, "Free Association"
9. Sleep Habits, "Antique Mall"
10. Toledo, "Cause & Effect"
11. Little Mazarn, "The Gate"
12. Sam and Louise Sullivan, "Avalon"
13. Golomb, “Real Power”
14. Maia Friedman, "Shape Is Your Own"
15. Major Murphy feat. Mark Lavengood, "Touch Grass"
Maia Friedman, Goodbye Long Winter Shadow
Maia Friedman is a touring member of Dirty Projectors and Coco, who leans in on ornate, orchestral, and timeless folk songwriting on her solo albums. Her latest, Goodbye Long Winter Shadow, is lush and layered with strings and woodwinds that lend Friedman’s soaring voice some gravitas. Singles like “New Flowers” and “Russian Blue” are stunning, but some of the truly transcendent moments come in the cohesive and intentional interstitial tracks. Produced by Philip Weinrobe (Adrianne Lenker), everything is in its right place. Friedman packs 15 songs into an efficient 31 minutes here, and not a second is wasted.
What I watched:
Black Bag (directed by Steven Soderbergh)
Steven Soderbergh is a remarkably consistent and prolific director. You could call him the “Spoon of filmmaking,” but the guy takes so many left-field genre swings that the comparison feels off. In the last decade, he’s been behind the NBA agent film High Flying Bird, the excellent NASCAR heist caper Logan Lucky, the COVID thriller Kimi, and Magic Mike's Last Dance. (Maybe he’s the King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard of film directors.) His latest is the talky and tense spy drama Black Bag, which was fun and boasted solid performances from a good cast. It’s yet another 3.5 out of 5 entry in Soderbergh’s expansive career.
What I read:
Martyr! (by Kaveh Akbar)
There’s a reason I waited several months for the library hold to come through to read Kaveh Akbar’s debut novel Martyr! One of 2024’s breakout books, the Iranian-American poet’s ecstatic and vibrant prose dances on the page, weaving an ambitious narrative that tackles addiction, immigration, devoting yourself to art, family histories, and dreams. It’s always great when something lives up to its sky-high hype. Really enjoyed this one.
The Weekly Chicago Show Calendar:
The gig calendar lives on the WTTW News website now. You can also subscribe to the newsletter I produce there called Daily Chicagoan to get it in your inbox a day early.
In addition to that excellent Ryan Davis song, Sophomore Lounge just put out a beautiful folk album by Louisville artist Grace Rogers called Mad Dogs. Huge couple weeks from them! Great label.