The Meaning Of: JUST FRIENDS
Crissi Cochrane
Welcome back to The Meaning Of, a series of blog posts exploring the meaning behind each song from my 2020 album, Heirloom. I’ll explain the stories that inspired the songs, and reveal some of the roots and references that helped shape my musical and lyrical choices. If there’s something particular that you’re curious about that I haven’t revealed, leave me a question in the comments below, and I’ll be pleased to answer it.
The next song in the series is Just Friends.
In middle school, I loved school dances, and didn’t miss a single one. I wasn’t terribly popular at them - at that time, I was so desperately trying to no longer be the nerdy teacher’s pet that I had worked so hard to be in elementary school. I didn’t always get to dance with a boy, but I loved the novelty of hearing music played at ear-splitting volume, being with my friends, and basking in the inevitable pre-teen drama.
When I went to my first live shows, I applied the same enthusiasm and strong attendance record to the local music scene that I had previously never known existed. Discovering this world was like the part of a movie where the footage goes from black-and-white to sudden, vivid technicolour.
I fell in love with local gigs. I was drawn to the people, who seemed so much more intense and colourful than the kids at school. Being present felt like the perfect mix of finally fitting in, and also standing out in a good way. I met my first boyfriend at a local gig. (And almost every other romantic partner since.) I’ve made some of my best friends there. Of course, how could I not? Being a musician has been the defining narrative of more than half of my life now. Within a few years, I started performing - first at the end of the local gigs while the more serious musicians lugged their gear down endless stairs to their vans in the parking lot, and then, at every coffee house, variety show, and fire hall gig that I could.
Performing at a variety concert at my high school on December 6, 2006.
But there were only so many places I could perform in the Annapolis Valley as a fifteen-year-old in the early 2000s. After I received my first invitation to perform at Just Us Cafe in Halifax, I started heading to the city at every possible opportunity, to play or be at every possible all-ages show.
At the beginning of grade 12, my first long-term boyfriend broke up with me, and, spurred by this rejection, I spent the fall recording my first EP. I played all kinds of shows with my little handmade CD, and I filled a peanut butter jar with crumpled $5 bills and coins. That winter, I fell completely in love with a musician from the city after seeing his band at the local Lions Hall. I escaped to the city every possible weekend to see him - I’m your little runaway. I once told my parents to drop me at the mall to meet up with a friend and spend the night at their house, but as soon as they drove away, I caught a cab to the bus station and spent the night in the city with my boyfriend instead. I think I was actually still 17 when I did that. Jesus.
Performing at the Coldbrook Lions Hall on July 12, 2007.
All of this lead-up is to give you context for the year that our lives entangled - 2007 - which was the most dramatic and consequential of my youth. I was at the apex of my teenage angst, I had finally manifested my dream of being a musician, and I wanted to move to Halifax, but my parents were moving to New Brunswick. I was smitten, but I don’t think he ever actually called me his girlfriend - what we had was undefined. Mutual friends were always telling me they’d seen him somewhere with someone else, but I was mostly too infatuated to give up on him (and all this drama provided such great inspiration for my angsty poetry). Every time I boarded the bus back home to the valley after a weekend together, it felt like a break-up, because I’d have no idea if he would see someone else while I wasn’t around. On the long drives home, I swear it felt like I was all alone. It being high school, I wasn’t terribly good at communication, so I don’t even know if I ever outright asked him if we were an item, or if he was seeing other people - who knows.
I moved to Halifax that summer, as soon as I finished high school. I lived in a miserable mouse-infested town house on Chebucto, where some musicians from the Valley had been living - and partying, extremely hard - for the past year. Oh god, what a shit hole it was. The guys couldn’t figure out the garbage collection schedule, so there was a room off the kitchen that was FILLED with rotting garbage bags. The front doorknob was broken so it couldn’t be locked, and the knob on the back door was MISSING. There was a body print in the drywall where someone had fallen (or been thrown?) down the stairs. The first thing I did was install a door knob with a key on my room and buy my own mini fridge so I didn’t need to set foot in the kitchen at all. I remember once opening a drawer looking for a baking sheet, and a mouse popped out. I mostly lived off of white bread, peanut butter, and root beer.
Our unit was the corner one, with all the big windows. My bedroom was on the top floor, connected to that top sun-room, which was wonderful. The windowed room below was where they kept the mountain of garbage.
I lived there only one month. I was planning to go on tour for the rest of the summer with the on-again-off-again boyfriend and his latest instrumental band, so I moved my few meagre possessions to my Aunt Nancy’s house. Unfortunately, the person who said he’d booked our tour actually hadn’t booked a single god damn thing, so now I was homeless. But it was fine, because after spending a few weeks torturing my parents in NB, I returned to the city where my boyfriend and I took up again, he was calling me his dream girl, and we were inseparable. We couch-surfed for weeks, collapsing into each others arms on air-mattresses, futons, on the floor at random parties. We mostly stayed at a friend’s house in wealthy Hammonds Plains, where every night turned into a Bright Eyes sing-along with endless rounds of “Land Locked Blues”, and I loved the scenic drives out of the city, roads winding through woods and past a sparkling lake, to sprawling manicured lawns topped with mini mansions. The windows down, the sky so blue, listening to Broken Social Scene, smoking his Peter Jackson cigarettes - you’re my cigarettes on a summer day. Everything was beautiful, I was untethered and open, and my heart was flying.
In the fall, I finally managed to get my first real apartment, and to keep it, I got my first real job. I worked full-time at a call centre, from 4PM to midnight, taking verbal abuse from MBNA MasterCard customers. I was too busy to see my boyfriend much, and I got another one of those calls from a friend who saw him at the mall with somebody else. My co-worker called him up on our break that night, and cussed him out with so much enthusiasm that I finally stopped crying. That was the official end to our strange relationship.
Ocean Towers, a three-building apartment complex, where I had my first real apartment - tower 2, fifth floor.
Even though I tried to make a clean break, it was very clear that we could never be “just friends”. He’d appear in my periphery at a party or a show, and I’d be drawn back into his orbit again. I at least maintained a degree of separation in the years that followed - I had a boyfriend who was sweet and mature and took excellent care of me, so nothing further ever happened - but we kept hanging out occasionally, taking long drives and crushing endless cigarettes, always leaving something unspoken, chasing the feeling of our lost summer. Funny enough, I wrote a poem about one of our hang-outs, and when I shared it out of the blue with Mike (long before we eventually got together), he was so enchanted with my writing that he professed he wanted us to “become closer somehow”.
As someone who draws from personal experience in my writing, this story eventually bubbled back to the surface. How could it not? The year was noteworthy just for the fact that I spent more nights in different places than in the entire rest of my life combined. Through all the parties, the shows, moving out of my family home and into the Chebucto shit-hole, officially pursuing my music career, seeing my parents’ new house, couch-surfing, and finally getting my own place, our relationship tinged everything.
I wrote the chords for “Just Friends” in 2016, and after sitting on them awhile, I decided to exorcise myself of our story. As in the case of the previous song on the album, “Something We Did”, this song is both an exploitation of past experience for the sake of a song, and also, a possibly ill-advised bridge between myself and someone else when any other method of contact would be even more wildly inappropriate.
This song is the longest on the record, clocking in at over 5 minutes long, and is one of the few tunes on the album where I did some arranging - I wrote the back-ups and the bass-line, and a good deal of the horns as well. It’s one of the first songs I demoed at the beginning of production, and for a while, I intended to name the album “Just Friends”. It would have been a cute nod to the fact that the album was played almost entirely by musicians who are friends of mine instead of hired guns, but in the end, I didn’t feel that the name really covered the entire aesthetic of the album.
This song is unique on the album because it’s the only song that features two drum-kits. It was Mike’s idea, citing the example “Hard Case” by the Tedeschi Trucks Band, who always play with two drum kits. On Heirloom I had enlisted my high-school best friend Jeff Kingsbury to write and record all the drum parts from his home in Ottawa, but since we’d already wrapped up his part of production, Taylor Unis, who plays in my band here in Windsor, added the second kit.
JUST FRIENDS - CRISSI COCHRANE
All the girls say you look like a movie star
With your pretty scars
But I know who you are
You're my cigarettes on a sunny day
I'm your little runaway
I'm high on every stupid thing you say - like
You're my dream, it's you I crave
You make me wanna misbehave
What we had was undefined
But I still believe love is blind
When we were never just friends
Now we just pretend, now we just pretend
We were never just friends, just friends
All your loving gave me such a pretty bruise
Had me so confused
Singing Land Locked Blues
But it was on again, off again, on again
Off and on the long rides home
I swear it felt like I was all alone
But you said you're my dream, it's you I crave
You make me wanna misbehave
What we had was undefined
But I still believe love is blind
When we were never just friends
Now we just pretend, now we just pretend
We were never just friends, just friends
We were never just friends, now we just pretend
All the girls say you look like a movie star
With your pretty scars
But I know who you are
You're my dream, it's you I crave
You make me wanna misbehave
What we had was undefined
But I still believe love is blind
When we were never just friends
Now we just pretend, now we just pretend
We were never just friends
We were never just friends
We were never just friends, just friends
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