The Fray show us how to save a life

11 December 2008

0Comments | Comment on this Article

The Fray made huge tidal waves back in 2005 with their debut album; How To Save A Life, and found uncharted success with their singles from that album, Over My Head (Cable Car) and the title song from the album.

But 2009 sees the newest releases from the Grammy Award-nominated four-piece from Denver, Colorado and they are set to bring joy to your ears with their new single, You Found Me and a delicious new album released February 2nd.

Obviously FemaleFirst had to get in on the action and caught up with the guys to find out everything about their new release, whether or not it can live up to the success of How To Save A Life and becoming an astronaut.

How excited are you for your new single and album next year?

We’re super excited. We feel like this new record is a pretty nice step forward for us. We’re really proud of it already so we’re excited to share it.

There’s going to be a lot of anticipation on whether the new album can live up to the success of How to Save a Life. Do you think it’s as good or better?

We feel like it’s better musically. Everyone’s talking about the pressure of the second album being a success but it depends on what type of success you’re talking about. If it’s commercially, then to some extent, that’s out of our control because all we can do is make better music than we’ve made before and we feel like we’ve already done that so everything else is really up to the system.

What was the inspiration behind the album?

I don’t think there was one definitive thing – we didn’t sit down and say ‘this album is going to be about this’ or whatever. We just kinda, from a song writing point of view, the song writers approached it with what they did before, writing about things that were important to them, close to them, their experiences.

But for the most part of it there was a running theme of the process of making [the songs] much more intentional that the first one. In the first one, to some extent, we didn’t really know what we were doing and we didn’t really know what to expect so we were just recording the songs we already had.

This time, we’ve had enough time to reflect on the process of the last one and be a lot better about the way we record it and the way we wanted stuff to sound.

Can you sum up the album in just 5 words?

The first word that comes to mind would be: Better. But then there are, Intentional. Mature. I don’t know. I have two words left but I’m not really sure. It’s just like, we felt it was the next step forward.

So to talk about the lead single from the new album “You Found Me”. What made you choose to release that particular song first of all?

We felt like lyrically and musically that’s a pretty good middle ground between all the stuff that’s on the record. It sums up the record pretty well and who we are as a band musically. And also, it’s one of the oldest of all the new songs.

Pieces of that song we wrote back when we were writing the first record and there were bits and pieces that had matured and developed into the song that it is now. So in a way, because it’s got the same elements, its rooted in some older times for us. It’s kind of a better gateway song to this new record without coming out of the gate with something completely new.

Who do you look up to within the music industry?

A lot of people. Just the other day we were talking about the generation of older songwriters like Elvis Costello; how in their time, they didn’t really write a song to be a single, they just wrote a song because it was an amazing story, and there’s a level of artistry in song writing that is hard to find now.

It was a different time and it’s kind of romantic now to look at that. It’s inspiring that they’ve still managed to continue their career through a lot of changes in the music business and I think that’s one of the more admirable things you can do.

Who do you think are the best artists around in the industry at the moment?

There isn’t one but I will say that music really exciting. There’s a lot of good music. In the states, I don’t know if you’ve heard of a band called Arcade Fire – a band like that with an enormous amount of success have remained to be who they are.

But as far as British music goes, we’re big fans of everything from The Kooks to Adele. It’s quality music. I mean, that’s 2 pretty different genres, 2 different artists but all quality music.

0Comments | Be the first to comment!