Returning to the Fray

Before the making of The Fray’s third album – released earlier this month – members of the band went on an international excursion. When they returned they wrote more than 70 songs and narrowed it down to 12. In this interview conducted in advance of the band’s Saturday show, guitarist/bassist Joe King talks about why scars are sexy, the songwriting binge, and family ties in Spokane.

IJ: You’ve got a unique connection to Spokane that goes back to childhood, can you say a little about that?

JK: Spokane is definitely a part of my family. I remember driving up every summer as a kid, visiting the lakes in Idaho. And Spokane was one of our first out-of-state shows we did as a band.

IJ: You had a pretty special moment when your grandmother got up on stage and played tambourine during the show.

JK: Yes … my grandmother was a princess of Spokane. She had all the boys chasing her when she was young. And she gets on stage with us, and she obviously still has her looks, and she shakes her hips and plays some tambo. The crowd cheered louder for her than they did for the band.

IJ: The band used some of the album budget to travel before writing the new record.

JK: For me it was a time for reflection on where I was at in life. It’s good to get out of the comfort zone and get out of the same old box. Once you get uncomfortable you open up more and you experience more and you can pull from those things and it helps you make sense of what that box is and what the normalcy is within life. I saw diverse cultures and cities. And it was different than when you travel for a living all of the time and you’re just passing through. This is a different kind of traveling when you can go and look outside of the normal day to day.

IJ: How did the experience influence the songwriting?

JK: For me, personally, what was influential on the record was the past two years. I was going through some of the darkest times of my life when a relationship I had ended. It was a massively devastating experience. Coming from the depths, when I’m at zero, at that point where you either stay there or see if you can make it up to 0.2. There’s an African word for when you go back to the site of destruction, say if your home burned down, and take anything good from what was destroyed. The temptation is in leaving it behind. Getting something good out of it is the hard part of going back.

IJ: You wrote more than 70 songs and narrowed it down to 12 for “Scars and Stories.” What was that like?

JK: We were writing like crazy after I came out of this crisis. I was playing a lot of piano melodies. It was a huge release. The hard part was narrowing it down. That’s one of the good things about time. We waited a bit and let time tell by what starts to fade off a month later. When you listen to something in the moment it’s the greatest thing you’ve ever written.

IJ: The deluxe version of “Scars and Stories” comes with five bonus tracks, a pretty eclectic collection of covers of bands like Fugees, Bruce Springsteen, and Yeah Yeah Yeahs. How did you decide on the selection and treatment of these songs?

JK: It became an exercise. We decided to break these songs down and play them our way and record them. We all picked our favorite songs we thought we could do in an interesting way and record it and then we put it on the shelf and didn’t think about it. About a year later our manager took them to the label and they said, “Wow! These are good,” and that we should put these out. It’s always refreshing to learn and play a really good song. For us, at least, the best way we’ve done covers is to do it our way. Like the Fugees cover, “Ready or Not.” That’s obviously a beast of a song, and for a band like us to play it is a strange combination. Isaac (Slade) does this white boy rap thing and it works. He’s channeling Lauryn Hill a little bit.

IJ: The album’s title comes from one of the songs that didn’t make the cut?

JK: Yeah. Once we started to figure out the title for the record, even though that song got crossed off the list, it represented the theme we were going with. We didn’t want this to be a life-is-so-bad record. Once we talked through it, scars are sexy. It’s what you lived through and you’re alive to tell about it. That’s an awesome thing and it’s not negative. It was a challenging title, to be sure.

IJ: So what are you going to do with the other 58 songs?

JK: I might do a solo record with some of them. But half of them are really bad so it would be a failure of a solo. I secretly have a few picked out, like, “Oh, I’m not gonna let this one go.” With others it was easy to do because they were just stinky.