Girl with a Hawk Photo credit: Kelly Davidson
There’s been a relatively cool faux-holiday to emerge in recent years, landing on the calendar in late November, that celebrates friendships and gratefulness and all the people in our lives that make up our chosen family. It’s been dubbed Friendsgiving, an obvious portmanteau of “friend” and “Thanksgiving,” where people come together in a similar fashion to the more familiar communal holiday, raising a glass to the ones they love and admire, despite no formal bloodlines or legal binding. Because when you’re in love with your friends, it’s truly something to cherish.
Girl with a Hawk understand this sentiment all too well, and just before the holiday season takes over our social lives, the Boston rock band led by vocalist, guitarist, and songwriter Linda Viens releases a buoyant and infectious new power-pop single titled “I’m In Love With My Friends.” The Big Takeover is officially premiering the track today ahead of its Rum Bar Records release on Wednesday.
The official release of “I’m In Love With My Friends” arriving a little more than a fortnight ahead of Thanksgiving is purely coincidental, as the song spins a tale fit for any time of the year, where the friends we surround ourselves with become the ones we lean on and love the most – in good times and bad, in happiness and sorrow.
“‘I’m In Love With My Friends’ is an homage to one’s ‘ride or dies’; our true-blue friends who are there for us when the shit hits the fan, who make us laugh when things look dark, and who inspire us to be our best selves through all of life’s challenges,” Viens tells The Big Takeover. “Romantic relationships don’t always survive those challenges, but authentic friendships usually do.”
Produced, engineered, mixed and mastered by Pete Weiss at his Jade Cow Music in Somerville, Massachusetts, and recorded by Weiss at Panoramic House Studio in California’s Stinson Beach, “I’m In Love With My Friends” sets up a forthcoming full-length set for Spring 2026 release and is Girl with a Hawk’s first new music since “It’s The Way” in July. Just before the release of March single “No One Like You,” a track inspired by the passing of Foo Fighters’ Taylor Hawkins, Viens was inducted into the New England Music Hall of Fame.
With Girl with a Hawk, rounded out by Richard Lamphear (keys, backing vocals, and a rippin’ display of Hammond and Farfisa organ), Daniel Coughlin (guitars, backing vocals), Dan Bernfeld (bass, backing vocals), and Nancy Delaney (drums, backing vocals), Viens is lucky to count her own bandmates as close personal friends.
And no song titled “I’m In Love With My Friends” is complete without a bevy of guest vocals adding to the love fest, so the band enlisted Linnea Herzog of Linnea’s Garden, Crow Follow’s Agent Judy, and Holly Kantor of Galaxy Cake to expand the vibe and bring additional voices in the form of classic gang vocals to the party.
“Also, ‘I’m In Love With My Friends’ is a love song to the very special bonds that musicians and creative collaborators of all kinds share,” Viens adds, “one that’s platonic, yet extremely devoted, and often containing an unactualized romantic component.”
The single artwork for “I’m In Love With My Friends” echoes the sentiments of the song, depicting Viens and her former Crown Electric Company bandmate Carolyn Kaylor in a warm, loving embrace. It was snapped back in the lost mid-‘90s by Viens’ ex-husband Wayne Viens, an esteemed Boston rock photographer and documentarian who was also in the funk band
“We mostly played VFW Halls and the shows were one massive love fest,” Viens says with a laugh. “Carolyn is still one of my closest friends and I always felt our love was visibly palpable in this photo.”
And while previous Girl with a Hawk tunes run the gamut of genres, touching on glossy pop-rock, Americana twang, empowering folk-pop, punchy power-pop, sleek synth-pop, and sometimes just old-fashioned, old-school rock and roll, “I’m In Love With My Friends” is defined perhaps not by its sound, but its vibe. Viens’ yearning in the lyrics, passing by houses where families are assembled and lamenting not having a lover in her life, only to realize the friends she’s about to meet up with at the bar are her family, belies its upbeat and embracing mood. It’s an arresting song that reflects the times, balancing a few different emotions at once as we navigate our next steps in life – and appreciating the various stops along the way.
“The fearful uncertainty of the pandemic informs the kind of ‘happy/sad’ vibe of the song, but it’s also about emerging from that time with renewed gratitude and deep appreciation for the many many things that I personally took for granted,” Viens concludes. “The last verse is a clarion call (forgive the cliche) to ‘seize the moment’; this day, which is really all we ever have, and throughout the song there’s also a surge of collective joy in the way the choruses unabashedly declare ‘I’m in love with my friends!’
New music on the way? Pitch Big Takeover Exclusives.
