Songs for the Friday-night hour

There's a particular hour I write for. It's somewhere between five and eight on a Friday, when the week is behind you and the night hasn't started yet.

It has a sound. It's a little loud, a little loose, and it smells like salt and sunscreen and somebody grilling a block away. Nobody's tired yet, and nobody's pretending to be impressed. They're just glad to be out.

I think most good party songs come out of that hour. Not midnight, when everybody's already gone too far, but the part right before, when anything could still happen and everybody knows it.

That's the target for a lot of this record. Songs for the walk from the parking lot to the door. Songs for the first round and the first real laugh. Songs that make a roomful of near strangers feel like they've known each other since high school.

I don't think that's small. A good week is mostly a few nights like that strung together. If the songs can help make one of them, I'm happy.

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