My Life In 35 Songs, Track 33: “Friends” by Matchbox Twenty

All my friends, all my friends are here

“All my friends are here.”

Those were the words pumping out of my AirPods as I took off from the start line of my second-ever marathon.

Wind back the clock a decade ago and show me the words I just wrote, and I would not believe they were genuine. Despite being a long-time distance runner, the idea of facing down the grueling task of running 26.2 miles without stopping didn’t just sound unpleasant – it sounded stupid! But the pandemic reoriented a lot of things for me, one of which was my dedication to distance running. And so, on May 27, 2023, I laced up my racing shoes and gave the marathon distance my second try, despite some excruciating memories that were still fresh in my brain from having run the same distance on the same course just one year earlier.

The running community has mixed feelings about racing with music, especially marathons. There’s this belief, in some circles, that music is a crutch, or even a distraction. Having tried racing a marathon since that second one without headphones in my ears, I can definitely understand the appeal of leaving yourself open to hear the world around you – conversation with other runners, cheers from the crowd, snippets of whatever songs spectators happen to have blaring out of their Bluetooth speakers as you run by – not to mention the sharp focus you can lock into when there’s nothing in your head but the miles. For my first five marathons, though, I did run with music, and during that second one, it helped carry me off to a level of serenity I had never achieved before and have never returned to since.

A lot of that, I think, had to do with the song I chose to kick off marathon attempt number 2.

The day before that race, Matchbox Twenty released Where the Light Goes, their fifth album as a band and their first one since 2012. Matchbox Twenty had been one of my favorite bands in the world growing up. Starting with their hit-filled debut album, Yourself or Someone Like You from 1996, this band and their angsty, melodic songs were a platonic ideal for me of what music could be. I still can’t hear tracks like “Real World,” “3AM,” or “Push” without flashing back to car rides to school when I was in first grade, my brother’s copy of the Matchbox Twenty debut spinning in the CD player. Later, as I started governing my own music listening, 2000’s Mad Season and 2002’s More Than You Think You Are were some of the first albums I truly fell in love with. The former was, for a time, my very favorite album ever.

When I wrote about Counting Crows earlier in this series, I wrote about how I fell deeply in love with their music right around the time they stopped being a regularly active band. The same exact thing happened with Matchbox Twenty. After More Than You Think You Are, it would be a full decade before there was another proper Matchbox album – though the band did resurface, briefly, in 2007 for the greatest hits compilation Exile on Mainstream. That collection delivered six new songs, several of which were great, but it only left me wanting more. Five years later, the band finally dropped North, their fourth album. I remember that record coming out at the tail end of summer 2012, right before I headed off to my final year of college. When I pushed play and heard the first words of the first track, I was taken aback at just how prescient they seemed for where I was in my life at that moment: “When the slow parade went past/And it felt so good you knew it couldn’t last/And all too soon, the end was gonna come without a warning/And you’d have to just go home.” So went the first verse of “Parade,” a song about the fleeting nature of things. I couldn’t believe how much this band from my childhood was speaking to my cusp-of-adulthood moment.

I guess I should have figured that Where the Light Goes, when it finally arrived another 11 years after North, would have something to say about my life, too. But that was the thing with Matchbox Twenty: between every (sporadically released) album, I’d inevitably lose most of the remaining faith I had in the band. I lost faith that they’d ever reunite, sure, but I also lost faith in frontman Rob Thomas, whose solo albums consistently made me wonder whether this guy who couldn’t not write hits for the first decade of his career had run completely dry of inspiration. Those solo records, for the most part, just didn’t have “the juice,” whatever that was, and they made me second guess the love I’d had for Matchbox Twenty’s music in the first place.

So, color me surprised when, two days before my second marathon, I sat down to listen to Where the Light Goes and it totally blew me away. These were big, melodic, propulsive, infectiously fun radio rock songs. I was particularly taken with the first track, “Friends,” a song so celebratory and effusive that on those first few listens, it got my heart racing just from hearing it. I don’t remember if I’d had a song in mind to kick off marathon day, before Where the Light Goes landed, but after listening to “Friends” a dozen times in those first few days, I knew it was the only track that would do the trick. It was precisely the shot of adrenaline I needed to face down this epic challenge with excitement and anticipation rather than nerves or doubt.

I remember running the first mile of that race with a big grin on my face – partially because of the crowds, partially because I felt totally fit and totally confident that this day was going to be special, but mostly because of the song. “Friends” is about how life can pile things on top of you and “knock you out of key,” but how you can find the strength to keep getting up, keep fighting, keep running, and keep finding joy when you’ve got the right crew there to have your back.

“All my friends/All my friends are here,” Rob sings repeatedly in the chorus.

Those words came to be my mantra throughout that race, even when, inevitably, I hit a point where it started to feel really fucking hard. I just had to keep telling myself that, no matter what happened, all of my friends were indeed here. I had buddies out there on the course with me, sharing the miles of the race and making them seem a little easier. I had friends on the sidelines, shouting out encouragement, or maybe passing me bottles of water or Gatorade to help in the battle against dehydration. I had friends tracking my progress virtually, as I hit the various checkpoints along the course. And I had a whole lot of friends waiting for me in the bleachers when I came around the final bend, onto my old high school track, and sprinted down the straightaway to the finish.

I crossed the line that day in 2:34:14, good for 5:53 per mile. It is, as of this writing, the best race I have ever run, in any distance. For whatever reason, that day, I slipped into a one-of-a-kind runner’s high. After a few miles, I just went somewhere else in my head, to the point where most of the miles and most of the songs are nothing more than a far-off blur in my memory. While I don’t remember much of that actual race, though, I remember everything about the aftermath: my mom fetching me a bottle of water as I keeled over the fence next to the finish line, trying to catch my breath and come back down to earth; my wife and my friends congratulating me, with big smiles on their faces, as they all poured out of the bleachers; the flood of texts on my phone when I got back to the car, all from people telling me how proud they were of what I’d just accomplished. And later that evening, after I’d crashed for a nap and consumed multiple gallons of fluids, I met up with friends again for a gorgeous bonfire evening on a nearby beach. And ate an entire pizza.

That day sticks in my brain as one of the best I’ve ever had, and it’s not just because I ran a PR and walked away from the race feeling totally satisfied – a genuine rarity for us runners, let me tell you. No, the reason that day was so special was the outpouring of love I felt during every single second of it. If you’ve read this whole series, you probably already know this, but I have never been the person to make friends easily. I’m shy, and reserved, and I second-guess myself a lot, and those things make friendships hard to forge, sometimes.

But friendship is also one of the things I value most. When I look back over my life, the times that I was the happiest – particularly my high school years – were the ones where I felt like I had a really strong, tight-knit friend group around me. And the ones defined more by loneliness – like my first year of college, or especially my immediate post-college years – just feel off. In an Andrew McMahon song I love, he sings: “A world without color is a world without you.” He means it in the capacity of romantic love, but I often think of that line when I think of my friends, and of all the vibrancy they bring to my world.

So, here’s to my friends: the ones I see all the time and the ones I rarely see; the ones who live in my hometown and the ones who live far, far away; the ones I share miles with, or songs, or laughs, or memories; the old ones and the new ones, and maybe even the ones I haven’t met yet. On the day of my second marathon, it dawned on me that I had built the kind of friend group I’d been yearning for since high school, and I’ve made sure to feel the gratitude of that realization every day since. Matchbox Twenty and “Friends” might have propelled me to a great marathon under any circumstances, but I somehow don’t think so. Somehow, I think it was having that line “All my friends are here” echo around my head for two and a half hours, and being able to know with 100 percent certainty that it was true.

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