I Lost a Friend by FINNEAS Song Info
“I Lost A Friend” is the second and final single from FINNEAS' debut album "Blood Harmony". The song follows FINNEAS' own personal struggles that came with the loss of a friend, and he uses clever wordplay and imagery. In an interview with Rolling Stone, FINNEAS explained that the song was based on a real-life experience with a friend he had a falling out with. He also spoke about the unique writing experience, saying: "I wanted to be really careful writing this song. I think it’s really easy to be the altruistic hero of your own narrative and story. I wanted to be really careful not to do that in this song." The music video was released a month after the song on June 25, 2019, and it was shot in Lancester, California in one take. The video was directed by Sam Bennett, and featured FINNEAS drunkly running through a field as night turned to day. The song was later remixed by Marian Hill, and released on December 13th, 2019. FINNEAS also performed it live on Jimmy Kimmel on December 13th, 2019. In an interview with WBUR, Finneas revealed: "This is a song I wrote at some point last summer. It was, you know, pretty much autobiographical about a friendship of mine that lasted all through high school and kind of fallen apart. And I think it’s OK to have friends come and go in your life depending on how much real-life value that you add to each other. Like sometimes you just grow up and you have different interests and you ride in different waves. And I think that’s OK. But in this case, we were like still best friends, and I felt that there was, you know, a sort of a raw patch there of some form of resentment or maybe misguided envy or something. At the time, I wasn’t really sure how to deal with that, but I decided that it was probably best to try to write a song about it and to not write a song that was vilifying that person in any way or trying to make myself look like the victim. I’m really glad I wrote that song because it’s been fun to see how many people have connected with it and be like, ‘Oh wow, I guess everybody goes through that.’ Where there’s a lot of like breakup songs … but there’s not a lot like friendship breakup songs." In an interview with Pitchfork, Finneas explained: "I think the challenge with that song was I wanted it to get to a place at the end that felt really intense but I wanted to start really simple, and I think just sort of that steady slow climb was the biggest challenge. The coolest thing I felt that I found was I had this flute patch that I arpeggiated. It’s a weird patch but once I got it right,I was really pumped on it. Which sounded kind of percussive ultimately, just in its kind of high end. If you played that flute on one key, it would sound like an actual sample of an actual person playing it, because that’s what it is. But having it in this super staccato, randomized, playing a larger scale than it would actually be played on, really fun, exciting thing to me. And that kind of allowed it to build momentum. On the impact of the second chorus, the thing that ended up really making the difference was this sound of this RPG going off. That textural sound of all the glass breaking to me is so much more interesting than a crash on a cymbal." Finneas mentioned in a press release that the song was about “a falling out I had with [his] childhood best friend”.
