The Fray
Still awed by its debut’s success, the Fray returns with its second album

By Emily Zemler

If you don’t know the Fray, you haven’t been listening. The Denver foursome — singer-pianist Isaac Slade, singer-guitarist Joe King, guitarist Dave Welsh and drummer Ben Wysocki — skyrocketed from critically acclaimed local band to chart-topping pop group in a mere three years. The group’s debut, How to Save a Life, spawned singles that became some of the most-played songs of the year. Songs from the record also landed regularly on Grey’s Anatomy, Scrubs and One Tree Hill and garnered the Fray two Grammy nominations in 2006. Now, the band is back with its second album, a self-titled collection of songs written and recorded over the course of last year, and already its first single “You Found Me” was featured in a lengthy promo for the fifth season of Lost. All that and you might think the Colorado quartet has turned into pretentious rock stars, but they still seem awed by the rapid success. In a recent phone interview, Welsh discussed the new disc, the pressure associated with being a hit band and why books are better than TV anyway.

Where are you guys today?
We’re in Toronto. It’s freezing here. We have a ten-day small, underplayed club tour that we’re doing. Which basically just means that we get to go play the cool venues. We haven’t done that in about two years so it’s great.

You better soak that up before you start playing the big ones again.
I know! It’s only a matter of time before they send us back to the enormo-domes and places where they might as well be playing hockey.

Is it hard to play those big venues?
Yeah it’s definitely a challenge. I probably speak too ill of it sometimes. It’s hard to connect anywhere sometimes if you’re not playing right or if the crowd is a bit standoffish. It can be hard anywhere. But generally speaking when you have a number like 10,000 people in front of you sitting in bleachers it feels a little more disconnected than say the sweaty rock club.

Do you really play to 10,000 people?
We had a couple shows that tipped the scale. Boston was our biggest and also scariest show. I think it was 18,000 or 19,000 people sold out. It was insane. It was a very surreal experience. I don’t think any of us had any reference for what we did that night.

Is that when you realized just how popular your band is?
I guess you could say that. I don’t know if we use that as a barometer or if that was our goal necessarily, but it certainly makes you understand things a little better when you have that many people coming to see you. And frankly, two summers ago we had an entire tour of venues that size. It’s humbling in a very strange way. I think you could take it one of two ways: You could become the cliché egotist after seeing something like that or you could just kind of freak yourself out realizing that even more people are watching you with the potential to screw up so you better play your guitar really well.

Do you practice a lot to avoid those screw-ups?
Oh no, it doesn’t mean you practice. We don’t have time to practice. We just pray a lot more and hope things end up better.

Was there a sense of pressure when you starting making the new album to measure up with the success of the last one?
Yeah. I wish I could say that didn’t cross our minds once during the process, but it did. I think it would be impossible for a band like ours whose rise was quicker than we could have ever imagined and therefore we find ourselves three years later a little bit saturated with all these pressures — both internal and external. I think our record company is about as good of a major label record company as you can ask for. There was very little pressure from them actually. I think you always hear horror stories from major labels and we didn’t really have much of those so we’re really thankful for that. I think we made up for it with our own internal pressures though.

How did you deal with that internal pressure?
It’s a constant dialogue, both internally and between the four of us as a band. We all had expectations going in, both personally and collectively as a band, but at the same time you want to approach it without expectations. That’s what we did the first time because we had no reference and no frame of comparison for what to do and what not to do so we just did something and it worked. The sophomore record, which I’m sure is similar in most bands’ experiences, is negotiating between trying to do something like you would have done it three years ago with that naïve approach and at the same time having three years to learn what you don’t like about the last one and make better music. It’s a strange thing.

What were some of the things you didn’t like about the last one that you changed this time?
I think we can get into the habit of overly critiquing the last one, but I think ultimately we’re really proud of it because it did a lot for us, obviously. But that said, I think it felt a little bit too assembled. I don’t think any of us were the kind of musicians three or four years ago who could go into a room and play a song in five takes and have it be done. We were green and we needed help from technology and from hours of doing takes over and over again to find a good one. I think it lost some of that live cohesive element that I think a lot of the really timeless records have. Because they didn’t have the luxuries 30 years ago of clicking delete on ProTools. They were burning money if they were wasting tape. And also three years of playing songs on the road together over and over will, if nothing else, make you better at performance. I think we were able to make the sound a little more live, a little more cohesive. It sounds more like a unit playing songs instead of a bunch of people playing songs.

Did you go into the studio with the songs all written?
We went in with a lot of songs written and finished and then about halfway through, right as we were approaching our initial deadline — a pretty flexible deadline albeit, but a deadline — we looked and we had about six songs. And to release an EP as a follow-up would be pretty disappointing. It was a tough discussion one night, but we had to sit down in California one night and really discuss whether or not we had enough songs and if we didn’t how we would go about writing more and recording more and what we would do next. So the process ended up going from early February to early July instead of the six weeks we had allotted for.

Did that feel like a long time?
There were points when it felt long, but there were points in the first one that felt long and that one really only did take six weeks. I think there are moments in the studio experience that you become so narrowly focused that you lose sight of the big picture and I think that’s when things seem long. That’s when you’ve done a guitar pass 15 times in the last hour and you still haven’t gotten the right take. You become too absorbed in everything to realize you’re doing something that you absolutely love sometimes. But by the time we finished we were definitely ready to be done.

Why did you decide to self-title your second record rather than your first?
Other than a very honest answer of a small dose of procrastination and not exactly figuring out a title, once the label said, “You should figure out a title for this new album you’re going to be putting out” we discussed all the options, dug through a whole bunch of lyrics and to us nothing summed the album up more appropriately than if we were to self-title it. I think just because sometimes when you use the band name as the title of an album it represents “We’re not exactly sure what happened last time around and on the last album but this is more so of what the band is now. This is where we see ourselves now and this is how we would like to progress.” Especially with a title like How to Save a Life. That was such a rhetorical, enormous question. How the hell do you top something like that? We decided not to try and come up with something catchier and just self-title.

Have you already gotten calls from Grey’s Anatomy asking how many songs they’ll get to use off the new album?
Yeah, yeah. I think we’re going to take a little hiatus from the old Grey’s Anatomy.

That was cool you got your song in that promo for the new season of Lost.
You know, it’s so funny with all these TV shows. I’m not really a TV person anyway. So regardless if it’s good or bad, I just don’t watch TV at all. I can only take other people on their word as to whether a show’s good or not, and everybody said Lost is a decent one.

So you’ve never seen your music on any of these shows?
Not really no. I think I did see a Grey’s spot, once, the first time, or something. I was like “Oh that’s cool, I gotta go back to reading.” I’ve never been a TV person. I prefer books. Plus they’re a great way to fill up time on tour.

Do you have any literary suggestions for your fans?
I think a lot of people read The Fountainhead at some point as required reading and I, for some reason, didn’t. Now, I’m finally doing it. I think at my age it’s probably making a lot more sense than it would have if I’d read it eight years ago or something. It’s an amazing book. Everyone says it’s a life-changing book and it already feels life changing and I’m only halfway through it. I can’t imagine what’s going to happen in the second half! If my life isn’t changed by this book, I don’t know what would change it!

Do books influence you when you’re writing music?
Oh yeah. I think it’s just the tip of the iceberg to think that just music can inspire music. I think all of us have other artistic outlets that we seek creative influence from. For me, it might be books or film. Joe and I have talked about this. For him, it might be simply the art you can find in nature. In a divinely created thing rather than a humanly created thing. It’s not just music that has to inspire you. It’s anything you feel drawn to or even disturbed by or emotionally connected to. Something like that. It’s all of it, I think.

Have you come up with any coping mechanisms to make it through this album and touring cycle alive?
So far I’ve gotten into the habit of having at least five cups of coffee during the day. Which has helped a lot. I’m really energized right now! I need to have another cup right now. It’s going to be great. Other than overdosing on caffeine, I think after we finished this album we felt that we made a better artistic statement than on the first go-around. I think if we can continue to do that on future albums and incrementally always making step toward that undefined goal of being better artists, whatever that means. If we can keep having people come to our shows, and Lord knows it’s cool when 10,000 people come, but if we can get 1,500 people for our entire career then that’s cool. We can continue to make art that connects with people and is making us better artists and is influencing peoples’ lives. That’s all we can ask for. I think that’s a tall order, but hopefully we can do it.