I have an ex I still grab drinks with. We dated for almost a year in my twenties, figured out we were better at making each other laugh than making each other happy, and ended it before either of us got cruel. Nobody cheated. Nobody started rewriting history. Years later, I can sit across from him at a bar, hear about the woman he’s dating and genuinely hope she’s giving him great head. That friendship survived because we didn’t burn the fucking house down on our way out. Erin Greider’s We Could’ve Been Friends is for the guy who apparently missed that memo. She can imagine a version of their breakup where they both walked away bruised but still capable of liking each other. Then he lied and manipulated his way out of even that.
The grungy alt-pop of We Could’ve Been Friends gives that realization some dirt under its nails. Topher Mohr produces and plays guitar, bass and piano, with Stephen Haaker on drums, building a guitar-forward track that lets Greider sound clear-eyed rather than destroyed. There’s bite here, but she never sounds like she’s begging the relationship back. She’s taking inventory of what his bullshit actually cost. Romance was already over. Friendship was still sitting there as a perfectly decent consolation prize, and this man somehow managed to fuck that up too.
Greider gets the whole argument into one brutal image: “The car would be totaled / but you and me, we’d walk away. / A little shook up but practically unscathed.” That’s such a good description of the breakup she wishes they’d had. The relationship crashes. Fine. Call the emotional insurance company and move along. Instead, the lying and manipulation turn a survivable wreck into something she can’t come back from. Then she hands him the bill with “So if you weren’t the absolute worst / we could have been friends.” Fucking ouch. She isn’t mourning some fantasy where they get back together. She’s mourning the person she thought might still exist after they stopped fucking.
Los Angeles singer-songwriter Erin Greider has been writing songs since childhood and working with Mohr since she was 15. She also holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in screenwriting and a Bachelor of Arts in economics from Chapman University, while her filmmaking work includes the festival short Death and Life. That screenwriting brain makes sense here. We Could’ve Been Friends has a premise you can understand in seconds, then Greider keeps tightening the consequence. He didn’t lose a girlfriend when the relationship ended. His behavior afterward cost him someone who might actually have stayed in his life.
That ex I mentioned still makes me laugh, and I’m glad we were smart enough to leave something worth keeping when the sex stopped working. Greider knows that option existed here too. That’s what makes We Could’ve Been Friends sting. Sometimes losing the boyfriend is the easy part. Finding out he was too much of an asshole to keep as a friend is the breakup after the breakup.
