Unraveling Isaac Slade
Giving The Fray’s fill-in bassist, Jimmy, a high-five, Isaac Slade jumps off stage and heads toward his tour manager. “Where’s the interview lady?” he asks looking around. I stand up and say, “I’m right here.” He laughs and rubs his forehead in embarrassment. “Sorry I just called you an interview lady,” he apologizes. “No worries,” I reply. He motions to head outside and then realizing he doesn’t have the keys to the bus, we head to the in-house Pacific Records store.
We close the doors behind us, creating what feels like an “Inside the Actor’s Studio” vibe, except Isaac’s a musician, and I’m hardly qualified to be running such a production. We sit down on a round leather couch in the middle of the room, and Isaac climbs about, finally settling in a cross-legged position resting his head against his arm looking pensive and slightly intrigued.
The Fray, launched back in 2002 in Denver, Colo., became a reality when co-founders Isaac Slade (lead vocals, piano) and Joe King (vocals, guitar) solidified their quartet with the additions of long-time friends Dave Welsh (guitar) and Ben Wysocki (drums). Soon after, The Fray began paving its way through the local Colorado music scene, conquering one local radio station at a time, signing to Epic Records and ultimately taking the music scene by surprise. The Fray is a pretty nice surprise, I must say, with its early-Coldplay sound, heavy piano-drenched melodies, richly textured harmonies, and eclectic blend of musical variation and themes. Blending the styles of Coldplay, Ben Folds, Counting Crows, Better Than Ezra and other collective influences, it coins a sound all its own, designed to inspire and create a universal understanding listeners can identify with.
“Making music has to be honest for us,” Isaac smiles, explaining his personal understanding of music and all it signifies in his life. He continues: “I think of the songs that I’ve written that haven’t worked—those are the songs that I can trace back to a moment where I’ve thought, ‘people like to hear this,’ and it’s ultimately not what people want to hear. And then the songs that work, the ones that have an impact, that people remember, are the songs that 10 times out of 10, are the ones that are good for me, or bad for me, happy, sad, whatever it may be—fill in the blank. They are the ones that are real, stemming from something I’ve actually gone through.”
“All the good stuff out there is something that someone went through or is at least based on something they can imagine going through—something someone can write straight up about,” he relays looking at the floor, as if agreeing in dialogue with himself. “I think it also has to be fresh for you. I have a friend that won’t play a song more than 50 times because it starts feeling fake, and I know that feeling for sure, but to make that song mean something, you have to get back to where you were when you wrote the song. It’s a mix of being a writer, which requires honesty, and being a performer, which requires dishonesty, and walking the balance between the two. It’s a tricky thing. And when I say dishonesty, I don’t mean fakeness or lying; it just has to do with bringing the emotions back so it feels like it’s real in the moment. That’s hard sometimes. It comes down to transmitting that experience as real as I can from myself into your head.”
Interestingly enough, the band got its name because of the fact that the band members argue so much over writing songs. “We do actually [fight over writing songs]. If the songs are the resource of the band, they’re highly thought out, and the way that the band thinks out loud is just arguing over every single note and chord,” Isaac emphasizes. “We’ve definitely spent many a practice screaming at each other because the chorus wasn’t right or the melody was off. And in the end, it ends up being a compromise between the four of us, and we end up going a direction that we’re all okay with. Joe and I write most of the stuff and then we bring it to the band and then together we speed up and make it all hip. It’s a good process; it’s working so far.”
With the success of “Over My Head (Cable Car)” and How to Save A Life, the guys are adjusting well to the recent explosion of mainstream radio airplay and sold-out shows, with the kick-off of their Myspace.com-sponsored headlining tour. “The moment it started feeling real was when I got this e-mail from my drummer’s dad,” Isaac says. “He shoots videos of events for a high school, like proms and sports events. Anyway, he sent us a video of some talent-show tape that he had got from a high school in Denver, of a kid and his girlfriend doing a duet of the song, ‘How to Save A Life,’ and we’re sitting there freaking out that anyone would have the time to sit down and learn the chords, learn the words, learn the duet, and so forth.”
He shakes his head. “And then the radio, hearing yourself on it, is sort of a surreal moment,” he continues. “It’s ‘That Thing You Do’ moment when the guys are running into the appliance store screaming, ‘We’re on the radio!’ ”
Within their past few tours, The Fray has had the opportunity to open for bands like Ben Folds and Weezer. Being the fun-loving and rambunctious group that they are, the band members without a doubt have many a story to tell. “I think probably the most memorable moment was when we were out on tour with Weezer,” Isaac says. “The last night of the tour, the big band is supposed to prank the small band, and they were just like too jaded or something so they wouldn’t prank us. So we were like, ‘Well, we’re just going to prank them then.’ So on the last show of the tour—you know that ‘Beverly Hills’ song—well we all took our shirts off while that was playing, ran on stage while Weezer was playing their hit single, with bras on, throwing things at everyone, and we sang the ‘Hey!’s in the background. I can’t remember where it was, but there were thousands and thousands of people there. It was hilarious.”
The album itself, How to Save A Life, is a candid portrayal of soul-filled and thoughtful lyrics paired with emotional and powerful instrumentation. Together, the music and lyrics create a compilation of songs worthy of endless listening. “With the [album] name,” Isaac pauses, “we were trying to capture the moment between loving somebody that’s having a problem, loving them through that problem, to the point then when it changes to tough love, whatever the situation ends up being.” He describes further: “There are so many situations in life that you can’t possibly know what to do in each one; we just wanted to address the idea of writing an instruction manual. In reality, though, it’s not that easy. There are just too many factors in each of our lives that leave too many complications when things go wrong.”
“And so then the inspiration for the song, ‘How to Save A Life,’ is about my friend who was coming out of addiction with drugs and alcohol, and about all of the things that he was told could fix him and change him, which ultimately didn’t,” Isaac says. “He felt that people were turning against him, even though it was just their expression of tough love. So it’s really just an exploration of it; just to give people a dialogue of ‘How do you save someone?’ when you think their life is going down the drain.”
As the interview concludes, we go our separate ways, and I see the emotions that he describes and so adamantly pours into his music, fill behind his eyes.
Published Feb. 23, 2006.
