The Fray’s 2005 debut, “How To Save a Life,” built slowly, but after its title track scored a key placement in “Grey’s Anatomy,” it was off to the races.
The album has now shifted 2.3 million copies in the United States, meaning the pressure is surely on for its follow-up, due this summer via Epic.
“Everybody knows there’s expectations. They’re not just a band going in for the first time to make a record,” producer Mike Flynn tells Billboard. “To me, as a producer, I don’t like to put that card out on the table but I will use it to help push them, like, ‘people are counting on you now. You can’t just turn something in.'”
“It helps my cause too, because I can be like, ‘Hey, it’s not great. Keep going! Re-write this. Do it faster,'” Flynn says. “Bands seem to be a little bit more willing the second time to try something. They can always go back to the way they did it before.”
Flynn has logged time with the Fray in its Denver hometown doing preproduction on six new songs, which he describes as “incredible. They’ve turned into a great live band after two-and-a-half years of straight touring. Now they’re ready to pound stuff out.”
The group was playing new songs “Happiness” and “Dixie” during recent live shows, but it’s not clear whether they’ll make the cut. “I love those songs,” Flynn says. “But they may think of them as older because they’ve toured them a lot. We hope to have a good 25 or 30 songs to choose from.”
