In the wings is their promotional machine. A few years ago, the Fray’s audience and sales grew exponentially after a blitz of TV song placements. Their 2006 release How to Save a Life went through the roof in sales and downloads, and their recent release The Fray seems to be everywhere at once; the record debuted at number one, knocking Bruce Springsteen off his post-Superbowl high. The Fray has engaged our culture head on, outflanked the sagging front lines of the record business, and become an international act in the process.
I caught up with Isaac recently in Manhattan to discuss piano rock, sharing melodies with guitarists, the beauty of Weezer, and a new model for musical success.
“Syndicate,” the first tune on the new record, starts with a cool piano riff in an odd meter, which seems to set the tone for the record, and gives the whole production more of an edge.Dave Welsh, the guitarist, wrote that riff on guitar as a bridge. Up to that point, the song was kind of edgeless, and then it had this kick-ass bridge with a great guitar part. Then he went home for three days, and I stole the part and tried it as an intro for the whole song and it worked great. I even called him. I’m like, “Dude, can I play that? Because people are gonna think I wrote it on my piano,” and he’s like, “It’s for the song, go for it!” So sometimes I play something on the piano and the guitarists take it. Sometimes they play something on the guitar and I take it.
You also do a lot of stuff with intervals, like droning a fifth or moving a fifth with the pedal down, and that’s very guitar-like, too.My dream has always been to be the lead electric guitarist — and I’ve been stuck on the piano ever since!
The Fray toured with Weezer and Ben Folds, both highly influential bands.They were two of the biggest influences growing up, so getting to tour with them was ridiculous. It’s so simple. You hear this melody that [Rivers Cuomo] sings, then the lead guitar plays it for the bridge, then he goes back to the melody and then the song’s over, and you love it. Getting to play with Weezer, I got to see that simplicity. Ben is the opposite. He has these crazy, complex rhythms and chords, and the melody still comes across. I think Tori Amos, Ben, and Fiona Apple have laid the ground for writing songs that are so out there yet still connect. Weezer seems like they’re the opposite extreme. It’s like three chords, and they rock your face off.
Some might say that The Fray rocks harder than How To Save a Life, but it also has a bit of a dark side.We were on the road for years for that first record, coming from being hometown kids who didn’t travel tons. It was very lonely, and trying to write on the road was hard. We felt artistically frustrated on top of it. You’d be surprised how feeling like s**t makes good music.
The song “Vienna” from How to Save a Life has rich, almost classical harmony, and I hear the same sensibility on “Ungodly Hour” on the new record.Yeah. My grandma’s a classical piano player. “Vienna” is probably one of the best songs I’ve ever written. It’s the one I’m the most proud of. Actually, it’s one of the oldest songs we have, and it’s still fresh when we play it live. There’s a key change into the bridge. There’s all these minor seventh and flat fifth chords, the stuff that I was playing in my jazz band at the time that the Fray was starting to pick up. The goal was to make music complex enough that people got lost in it and forgot that they were listening to pop music. Joe wrote “Ungodly Hour” all on guitar. I know he loves classical music, but I think for the most part, the lyric just dictated that whole piece.
That root movement doesn’t sound like a guitar player to me!He did start out playing piano, and I think secretly he wants to be the piano player, and I want to be the guitarist.
How did you conceive the other keyboard work on the record? The layering on “Enough for Now,” for example.I’m not very good at the experimenting with keyboard textures. I’d love to get into it; I’m just so focused on that lyric and the bass. If the melody and the chords fit, I’m happy.
So while you’re focusing on the outline of the song itself, what other musical forces are at work in The Fray?I’m always yelling at the other guys, “Wrong chord! Wrong chord! Do not play that inversion!” So I figured out that’s my thing. Joe is the other writer. He sings and plays rhythm guitar, and then Dave is the lead electric and texture guy, and he’s obsessed with texture. Ben tells us to speed it up and slow it down, and puts the rhythm in there. Dave actually did a lot of the keys on the album. He borrowed all this gear and came back to Denver with a million textures and we picked 20 of them.
All of you are involved in the writing process, and you all share credit.This is the first time we’ve said that on the liner notes, too. I wouldn’t trade what we have for the world. To be able to play bad shows, good shows, to see my best friends going through it with me, that excitement, or that despair. Not to mention the fact that my songs would be so much smaller without them.
You seem to have a great relationship with a very supportive label.We’ve had amazing leadership. We had this little teeny shoegazer song. I was playing a felted Yamaha, with a lullaby kind of riff, then the big bad CEO of Sony, Don Lenner called and said, “That ‘How to Save a Life’ song is good, but it’s too quiet. You need to redo the pianos, play it on a Yamaha C7 grand, redo the drums, and I think it’s a single.” And I was like, “Oh no, the big bad label is telling us what to do, and he’s gonna change our art.” Then I thought about it, and I was like, “Gosh this is a song that I feel like I want people to hear, and let’s try, let’s just see what happens.” So we ditched the felt, redid it on a C7, and it became our landmark song.
Let’s talk about the music biz in general, your songs for TV for example. How does a changing business model impact a young band like yours?Coming from the local music scene, I have a very specific purpose in mind with the corporate relationships — the first being with Sony and Epic, my label, the second being with my management, a smaller corporation, and the third being with radio, TV stations and the press — everything that we dance with. From an artistic standpoint, you can look at it as evil, I suppose, because you may start to change your art to appease those groups. But if you can manage to keep your art the same, those relationships just become one giant megaphone for the art that you’re trying to get people to listen to anyway. If you water down your art so that those corporations like you, you become one of those bands that everybody hates, yet somehow are still popular. But if you can somehow manage to keep hold of the integrity of the art, then that megaphone ends up spreading your music to Perth and Vienna. We have fans in Mumbai because of the corporate relationships we have.
It’s interesting how you can tour and tour, but you get one shot on Grey’s Anatomy and suddenly you’re bigger than life.Yeah, and that’s the thing about the business. It’s changing. You can hold on to the old, and maybe make it fine, or you can try to figure out how to do the new model with integrity. Kudos to our manager for helping us do a good job navigating those waters. Grey’s came along and it literally added a zero. Our shows went from 2,000 to 20,000, and the international [audience] exploded. So I look back, and hopefully we’ll be able to shake the Grey’s Anatomy title, but if not, all I care about is that people can hear that melody, and they can hear that root. And I want that lyric to slip in when nobody’s looking.