THANKS to a little TV show called “Grey’s Anatomy,” the Fray has become synonymous with the kind of sensitive songs that bring girls to their knees, crumpled in a weepy puddle.
Considering their nice-guy demeanor and history of turmoil-filled tunes – see hits “Over My Head (Cable Car)” and “How To Save a Life” – it’s surprising to learn that the quartet has a selfish side. Don’t believe this is true? Check out their self-titled disc, out today.
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Nestled amongst the angsty, let’s-work-through-the-pain-together tracks is a song called “Where the Story Ends.” According to 27-year-old singer Isaac Slade, it’s about a “freakout” he had before his girlfriend (now his wife) moved from Seattle to Denver to be with him.
“It was the big step,” Slade recalls. “I had the ‘Oh my gosh, what if this doesn’t work out? I’m ruining this poor girl’s life’ [moment]. Instead of worrying about how she’s feeling, leaving everybody, I wrote this song – ‘I’m so worried about myself, I’m freaking out right now.’
“Naturally, [my wife] hates the song. She’s like, ‘Wow, that’s so noble of you, to freak out about yourself.’ I rewrote the second verse to make it her side of the story and balance it out a little bit, but that sting is still in there for both of us.”
Miffed feelings are just part of “the risk you run when you’re singing your diary,” Slade says. “It’s our style to write about what we know. Our lives and relationships are the inspiration for that.”
This explains why the band doesn’t do Top 40 party songs, although it’s not for lack of effort. “Oh my gosh, we tried,” Slade says. “We had this two-step sort of polka song once. We tried these super happy, bubbly songs, and they just come out cheesy. In a sense, we’re cursed with the suffering singer thing.
“Life is really hard. And if I’m going to be remembered for my 15 minutes on this planet, I want to be remembered for speaking truth and talking about the world that everybody else lives in.
“Growing up in church, there’s this thing they talk about, of looking at the world around you and responding to it. Inherently, when you see the hard things in life, you want to look away: It’s too much, I don’t want to deal with it. You either veg out or get sarcastic and callous, pretend like it’s never going to get better,” Slade says.
“I think there’s a third response. This world hurts a lot, life hurts a lot, but it’s still worth living. In that response, there’s a lot of melancholy because you know that you’re fighting an uphill battle, but that’s what life is.”
To get the point across, the Fray decided to rock out.
Unlike their debut, which Slade says they recorded “without playing the songs live” – resulting in “a really quiet record” that required hushing fans on tour – they kept their live show in mind while writing the new material.
Now, Slade says, when playing venues such as Webster Hall, where they have a gig tomorrow, “we’re excited to have a few more rockers, it feels like we can really lay into it. If the first record was a handshake, the second is a dinner at a restaurant with a tablecloth. You can sit down, spend more time one-on-one and go deeper.”