“I Miss My Friend”
Darryl Worley
Written by Tony Martin, Mark Nesler, and Tom Shapiro
Radio & Records
#1 (1 week)
September 13, 2002
Billboard
#1 (1 week)
September 21, 2002
Darryl Worley burst onto the scene with an excellent ballad called “When You Need My Love,” which demonstrated an emotional intelligence and self-awareness that was remarkable for a debut single.
Worley delivered on the promise of that early effort with the lead single from his sophomore set, “I Miss My Friend.” As a general rule, it was hard for the artists who emerged after the nineties to meet the high bar set by that era. Worley is an exception here, as this is a better John Michael Montgomery heartbreak single than Montgomery himself ever released.
He is vulnerable without being weak, expressing a masculine strength that makes space for his emotional needs. It’s a reminder of how country music at its best can help us articulate what our better angels inside are trying to tell us.
For this moment in time, he looks like he could be the successor to Joe Diffie or Tracy Lawrence. He goes in a different direction, which we will cover the next time he appears in this feature.
“I Miss My Friend” gets an A.
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Very very good. I give it a “B+”. Love the lyrics and melody and production are good (but not great). I am attempting to re-listen to these 2000’s songs with an open mind and they are good but to me they just lack the uniqueness I see in the 70’s. It’s probably unfair to compare but yet I can’t help it.
This was a great song, probably my favorite song from Worley – a definite “A”
Darryl’s first two albums are loaded with great songs. “When You Need My Love”, personal favorite “A Good Day to Run”, and “Second Wind” was one hell of a hat trick to start a career.
This one I think I gave an A- simply because “A Good Day to Run” exists. It’s warm, sensitive, and gives just enough detail about who he misses to feel personal while also being open-ended enough to relate to anyone who misses any friend.
But I’d bump it up to an A+ now. As I write this, my mom is downstate, scattering my stepdad’s ashes around Flint. I bet you she misses the “late afternoon walks” she had with him before early-onset dementia rendered him unable to do so. My stepdad often said how he felt something was missing in his life until she came along. And I think he brought a lot of color to our lives, and my mom and I did so to his.
I miss my friend, Randy.
Sorry for your loss. I’m sure this song hits particularly hard listening to it today.
It was clear to me early on that Darryl Worley really wanted to be his generation’s Merle Haggard. That’s true of a lot of rising Nashville stars even today but Worley channeled Merle’s vibe more effectively than most even if he fell short of Merle on songwriting chops. I always thought “A Good Day to Run” was the best Merle song that Merle never recorded, an on-point update of “Big City”. “I Miss My Friend” gets the same things right, at least in the abstract.
The laid-back delivery and simple message captures the sorrow without any need for bombast just as Merle would have done it. Still, the song’s lack of specificity is both a virtue and a vice. The song works as a tribute for pretty much anybody. Ostensibly we can deduce the narratorl is referring to a girlfriend he broke up with but it could just as easily apply to a lost parent. Back in 2002, I even recall speculation that it was written about a gay lover. The problem with singing an ode that could apply to just about anybody is that memorable narrative details never materialize to make the song stand out in a crowd of grief anthems a generation later. I don’t think I’ve heard “I Miss My Friend” played on radio in 20 years which suggests the sentiment doesn’t hold up to the Haggard standard.
Grade: B
FYI I’ve now tried three different devices on four separate days in two different hemispheres to try to post my review for “The Good Stuff”. It won’t post. No idea what the deal is with that.
I’m trying to figure out what flagged this comment as spam. We only have a handful of words (and one person) blocked. I restored the comment so you should see it now. Thank you for your rich and meaningful contributions toward our discussions!