FRICTION NYC

some of you have already noticed a couple of commercials using our music. many people have also noticed our music in televised golf tournaments and tennis matches and god knows what else over the past months, and that’s something we have no control over thanks to some broadcasting bylaw. but the car commercials are different–we did actually agree to them, much to our own surprise.

when we were first approached, it was honestly something we joked about. we have been approached about using our music in a good number of commercials over the years, and we’ve turned them all down (except for a new balance ad that never aired on tv as far as we know). we hope you know that we make our music because we love it and because it means everything to us, not because we want to help sell products. when we started as a band we were dubious that we would even play a show, or tour, or make a record, let alone make four records… and so on. and it certainly never crossed our minds that we could make this band our livelihood, our careers. but somewhere along the way that happened. for most of the last two years none of us have had any jobs other than the band–coming to practice every day, daydreaming about album art, song titles, et cetera, et cetera. none of us is well-off or remotely close to it, but we have made enough to live long enough to make a new record, for which we will tour next year, assuming all goes well.

it would be hard to overstate how much this band means to us. it is quite literally our lives. that we have stumbled across this way to express ourselves in such a pure way is nothing short of miraculous to us (who were previously a somewhat confused and depressed bunch for most of our adolescence and twenties, and in some instances still are). and, ideally, we want to be able to keep making music this way for the rest of our lives. but things change. families start growing, time starts becoming scarce, circumstances change. we are not ignorant. to think that we will be able to tour every year to make money for the rest of our lives is impractical at best. we are an instrumental band with a comparatively small audience. so then the questions begin: what are we going to do with our lives afterwards? none of us has any skills other than playing one instrument in a rather specific way that will probably only work in this one particular band. to think about the future is daunting and a bit frightening. to think about the end of something you truly love doing is fatalistic and very depressing. but unless you want to be blind to it, it must be done.

we might be going overboard with this–maybe nobody even cares about this sort of thing anymore. but we look at you, the listener, as someone close to us, thus the explanation. in many ways this decision was even more complicated than this makes it sound (welcome to the inner workings of a strange band). but in another way there is a fairly straightforward bottom line: they offered us a good amount of money and we accepted it. we are not going to buy cadillacs now. we are going to use it in the same way anyone else at any job would use it–to work towards buying houses, to paying the bills, to helping our families, and to hopefully save some. if for some reason our making this decision lessens your appreciation of our songs, then we are sorry.