Writing and deciding to perform this song live created the space I needed to be fully honest in my songwriting. It washed away a need for me to sugarcoat everything and freed me from the worry of what people thought about my music or me. "My Friends" was the first song written for Living Alone. Without giving too much away, it's about how painful events have colored how I see and move through the world, and how isolating it can feel to ignore or suppress those aspects of yourself. This theme is echoed throughout the EP. If it weren't for this song, I don't know if I would have written any of the songs on the record.

I sat on my bedroom floor in front of my amp and started noodling around on my guitar. The main riff fell into place pretty quickly and the lyrics spilled out shortly after that. This isn't usually how songwriting happens for me. Things take a long time. Though I had all the parts that I wanted - chorus, bridge, verses - putting everything in the proper place was difficult. Originally the bridge was the chorus and the chorus was the pre-chorus, etc. A songwriter friend of mine and I got together to workshop some things I was working on, and she helped me a lot in figuring out where things should go.

Once it was time to record everything with the full band, the song changed again. Some things I do live and solo wouldn't translate well on a record. Instead of having a musical interlude and ending on the bridge, which is what I do when I'm playing by myself, we added a chorus to the end of the arrangement and took out the interlude. Even though the record is about feeling isolated and alienated, it's an incredible comfort to come together with others through music and create something larger and more beautiful than anything I could have done by myself.