B-Side Guys

The James Henry Morgan Gang never plays the same show twice, different setlists, spontaneous covers, songs that debut live and then get reworked the next night. “Friend” fits right into that instability as its actual subject: a world of flux and change where the only stable thing on offer is another person willing to stick around.

That offer comes from a band built to prove the point. Jay Morgan fronts things, but the actual gang runs eight or nine deep: three backing vocalists who step out front whenever the song needs it, a keyboard player who spent years road-tested alongside Bonnie Raitt, a horn section putting wind behind the whole thing, plus bass, drums, and hand percussion holding the floor. “Strength in numbers is what I say,” the chorus insists, and the personnel list backs it up before a single lyric does.

The lyrics back up the collective’s own instincts too, warning that not every bear in the woods is actually a good hugger, one animal’s warm embrace turning out to be a threat depending on which bear you’ve actually met. That kind of wink sits next to real cynicism about a media world that keeps producing commercials, phone lines burning up with static, love struggling to get heard over all the noise. Old frontier language, circling the wagons, watching for the devil on the silk road, gets pulled into the same song as that modern static, both treated as reasons to stop going it alone. By the time the chorus loops back around one last time, the point’s already been proven twice, once in the lyric, once in the lineup.