The members of Friendly Strangers came together at Sarah Lawrence College, where they discovered their shared fondness for gospel, bluegrass and Romanian folk punk. Front man Curtis McMurtry (banjo) assembled Liam O’ Brien (fiddle) and Max Mamis (accordion) in September 2010, and Lucy Kahn (upright bass) joined them shortly thereafter. Since then, Friendly Strangers have developed a repertoire of songs regarding cosmopolitan angst, southern funerals, general bitterness and occasionally love (but usually not).
Innocent bystanders have described Friendly Strangers’ music as “really pretty except for that one song” and “like that other band but not really at all.”
Pretentious folks have described Friendly Strangers songs as “modern Americana sewn to the corpse of a prominent early 20th century poet” or “a collection of spiteful hymns sprinkled with rosemary and carefully burned about the edges.”
