In this week’s installment of the I Love My Friends sessions, holy pine — Daniel Machado, Marshall Brown, and Michael Crawford — performs “Pain and Joy.”

“I’m not cool enough for this,” Machado remembers thinking when he brought his violin to Aaron Graves’ house in 2015 to record on “How to Cook Everything” with Graves and Chris Gardner.

“A few months later I was tuning up in an appropriately cramped F.R.O.G. [finished room over garage] with Jessica, Aaron, Chris, Pat and Amy, feeling very, very welcome,” Machado says. “The My Bones Are Singing album release at NBT was a life-affirming blast, and the Columbia music community is wonderfully full of similar stories of being lifted up by The Whales and Fork and Spoon crew.”

That feeling of being welcomed into the room runs through Machado’s reflection on Aaron, Those Lavender Whales, and the community that continues to gather around the I Love My Friends sessions.

“When Aaron’s brain tumor returned and we lost him in 2019, his bandmates assembled that community to honor his memory and the music he invited us to make with him on the very same NBT stage,” Machado says. “Even in loss and grief Aaron’s people gave a gift.”

For Machado, “Pain and Joy” is “a song about a place where a person experiences their final goodbyes and first meetings with the most important people in their lives.”

“Hunter-Gatherer became a similar kind of place in Columbia,” Machado says. “True to their nature, the Fork and Spoon folks have turned this loss into another permanent community event.”