Frightened Rabbit

0:00So how are you feeling? I heard you were a little under the weather. Well I was actually, you know, like in terms of health wise I was fine. It was just my voice goes sometimes and it's like, I wonder what people have been doing on this table. So, er... Nice and rolled up there. Yeah, I know sometimes it just blows out. It's usually about halfway through to her and there's been a lot of shows in a row and my voice got tired. So I'm fine now. I went and got all these steroid injections and shit like that. Yeah, that's the emergency procedure is to try and like just take the swelling down in the vocal cords. So I usually get administered in your ass, but I didn't get it there this time. Where'd you get it? I don't know why I'm asking this question. It's just in the arm. Yeah, it's just in the arm. Yeah. Oh, you can see the little...

0:45Yeah, I know. That's me arse. Yeah. So, you're feeling better. So what happens when the show's cancelled like that? You guys try and reschedule it? Does it just... It was only one show luckily, so we are planning on coming back in October. So we're going to fit the Louisville, Kentucky date into that. So you're on the road basically for the rest of the year? Oh yeah, at least. Hopefully the album cycle expands quite a bit into 2014 as well. Yeah, I mean we're... I don't mind being busy. It's a good sign. Sometimes you can just get too busy for your own good, I think. You like the military lifestyle? Yeah. What do you call touring military lifestyle? I have compared it to that in the past. Now, that is really belittling the military in a terrible way because it's not nearly as difficult as that.

1:36However, the scheduling and the routine, the comparison that I made was... I think it must feel somewhat similar to come home after that and have none. You know, suddenly back in the normal world where you're not being told to do this then, or have everything done for you, like Ian who you just met, sorts our lives out really. And we're adults. I mean that's not a great sort of thing to get used to because when you get home you're like a grown up child who's like, why isn't someone going to get me coffee first? So it can be sort of a shock to the system coming home and I think the military must be that times 100. Oh, I would think so. So it's the hardest thing to adjust to when you do get home?

2:25I think finding a purpose to your day can be... I mean I'll tend to switch off for like three or four days and then try and get back into writing or doing something creative because I don't do much of that on the road. But yeah, it can be very easy because I guess my living isn't made on a day to day basis in terms of income. I can justify doing nothing for two weeks, but I shouldn't because it's not good for me. So it's like that sort of sense of aimlessness and a lack of purpose that I find I have to go out of my way to readjust

3:10to find a new schedule if you like. Interesting. So when you do get back you take those days off, you start to start wanting to write again. Yeah. Would you have a place that you go? Do you gravitate to a certain instrument first? Like how does that start? Is it lyrics? It's not lyrics first. What I'll do is on tour I'll have my phone gathering little bits of voice memo like things from soundcheck. Humming melodies, soundcheck, things that we're just working on, but never like a full song. So I'll come back and I'll just siphon through those. And there's a nugget and then I'll just work that into a song. So when I get back it's about just like sitting with the guitar and then to write lyrics I have to leave the house. So I go, for better or worse, the best place for me to write is a large Starbucks at the road because they don't play music too loud so I can ignore it.

4:05And it's a nice big space and I know I have a very weird borderline phobia about like physical space. We were too close, how were you doing? We were fine because we were doing an interview. Now if I was trying to write and have a coffee and you were sat right there doing something else, that would not be weird. But even then, like some cafes and restaurants and things like they just put their tables too close together for me. So that place has got space. I feel like I can have my own little world in them. And there's also a large window so I can kind of look out and observe. And I just, unfortunately it's a Starbucks but who goes to fuck? Or a coffee shop. So then are you writing it into pen and paper or is it on a computer? Oh yeah, it's always pen to paper first.

4:50I'll finalize on the computer. So the computer stage is the very end where it's like I think you can get a sense of, it brings, obviously it brings clarity because my pages are a mess. They're just like constant, like scurrying out, finding the right word. And then once I'll get through that I'll type it out on the computer at the final stages. But yeah, it's always still pen and paper I think. That's the most effective brain to page kind of path for me anyway. No I hear that. You mentioned scribbling out words. What was the most laborious song on this record to finish lyrically at least? I think. I mean, actually the wood pile went, even though it's probably the simplest lyrically, went through quite a few versions.

5:45It was a process of really thinning down the lyrics so that it wasn't over complicated. So that one took a while. You're putting too much of yourself into it. Yeah, I was... No, no, no, no, no, no. I don't ever mind that. That's never a problem. I would never censor it in that way. It certainly made the decision not to for this record. It wasn't that. It was about being too wordy to serve the song. So it was actually started off being with more complex verses. And they weren't really working. And it does take a little bit of self-restraint or self-criticism to go, you know what, I like these words. They're poetic and they're nice, but they don't work in this song. So that was a thinning out process of just slowly distilling it to what was actually required within that song.

6:34So that the whole thing was powerful and effective. And is this before the band years and stuff? Or is this after you've created the melodies with the band and everything in a different range? Yeah, I mean, they work in different ways. The majority of these ones were done with myself and one or two other members in the band. It's like a combination of whichever ones. It's usually me and Andy and then one other member. And we would work on the music, get a structure together. I never write lyrics without the song being there. So sometimes on a couple occasions like the Woodpile and late March, Death March on this record, those were written in a more traditional me in a room on my own fashion. And then a lot of the other stuff, most of the other stuff was written collectively.

7:23And then they would work away on other parts of the music whilst I was working on the lyrics. We were all living together. We had like three months separately in residence in houses in Scotland. And yeah, so we had set up one recording room. It was obviously like an entire like... There's a bunch of bedrooms and stuff that we would work in as well. So that was just kind of like a free open door process. If you wanted to come in and work with a music kid, if you wanted to sit in the next room and write a book, you could write a book. Nobody wrote a book. Nobody wrote a book. It's not a reader book. They're not writing books yet. Well, what's the book on the cover of the record? Is that a graphic or is that an actual book? I mean, that does exist. I find that... I actually couldn't tell you what the actual book is.

8:08But I went out and just bought a bunch of old books and I went to a company in Glasgow who do letterpress and embossing. So we contrived the logo and stuff like that. And it does exist. That's cool. I'm glad it's not a graphic. My mum has that. Oh, no, that was one of the stipulations. I've been working with the same designer for all of our records and he's very keen on making sure that if you're going to have a photograph, the information that you would need should be within the photograph already, rather than... He hates placing text on photographs. It's one of his peeves. So he tries to make sure that everything, like even the back cover for this record, was laid out, printed off, made to look old,

8:55and then rephotographed. Interesting. Yeah, so Dave's a hugely talented yet annoyingly anal man. And I'm glad he was dealing with it this time, because I used to have to deal with that. I did most of the artwork in the previous efforts and he would have me going back and handwriting things to the end degree and I'm like, Dave, Dave, please can we just... Because he would go to the point where he made a typeface out of my handwriting just to save me time. Really? Yeah. So that exists actually. And maybe one day I'll get that released. You should put the lyric book like that. I should actually. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, there are plans to do a lyric book as well, like the sort of mirrors, the front cover. We'll see if that happens. Yeah, so with the merch tape. I think it'd be good, yeah. Um... First line on the record.

9:41You have that dickhead in the kitchen, that's a bold statement. Right. And it's a very self-deprecating line. Well, it's not, you know, that song... I was, uh... I think there were a few reasons for putting it on the front end of the record. Like, we moved to a major label, I think a lot of very existing fans were like, slightly worried about what that might mean. That still happened, really? Fuck yeah. Yeah, yeah, there was a sort of general response of, you know, kind of like, trepidation. And I had it too, actually. I was worried. I didn't know what it was going to be like living in a major label now. You know, my fears were quickly, like, dissipated as soon as we started working with them, but... So I think putting that on the front end of the record, it was like a... It was a statement of intent as well, you know.

10:27It's like a fairly hard line. It's a... Mildly amusing line, and I think that... Um... That song is not... Although I'm saying it in, you know, first person, and it's talking about myself, I think I'm talking about, you know, the male population as a whole. What it's like to be... To try and be a good man, you have to suppress a lot of natural male instincts, I think. I agree with that. And that's what that song's about now. And I don't want to just start, like, by... talking shit about guys that are assholes or dickheads. I wanted to include myself in that as well, and sometimes my behavior is included in that, you know.

11:14Not too far away from those guys, you know. We all know what they're like. We've all seen them. And we all have the same instincts in a way, but some people are just better at suppressing them or keeping them at bay than others. And so that song kind of, for me, encapsulates what... You know, what I... What it's like to be a man, I guess. So I've read that you tried to write about other people's lives on this record, but then it didn't quite work out as well as you thought it was going through. No, I mean, just my life to go over a little bit. And, you know, sometimes you write... Sometimes you write because you have no choice. There's something to... Something you need to work out. And I write for that reason a lot.

11:59And I think, you know, just things are happening in my life that I needed to figure out. And I do that often through songs. It's one of the most effective ways I've found to do it. Because I'm not really very good at conversation in it or expressing these things within conversation with it. So, yeah. I was halfway through, and then I was writing about, you know, acts of man was done, state hospital was done, there's backyard skulls, the housing songs, maybe looking a bit more generally. And then specifics came in. But I think what was good was it started a mode of... It was a mode of language that, you know, was looking at, you know, was maybe less landscape...

12:45You know, kind of... The last record, I think, was an open landscape. And I think this one's a much more closed city environment or certainly a domestic landscape. So I think once it started that, then that language continued on into, like, December's traditions, talking about living rooms and, you know, where people's habitats and stuff like that, and people's habits. So, yeah, there was personal stuff. But hopefully it still works as an album, as a one piece. Do you try and write it so it's a one piece? I like that. Yeah, yeah. You know what? I mean, I don't... That really only comes to light at the very, very end when we're doing the tracklist thing. But, you know, I do try and...

13:30There has to be a thread. I think there has to be something that holds it together. And sometimes it's not apparent until you're actually at the end. But I like the format of an album. You know, it seems like a neat, compact... Because of the way that I, you know, like to... I feel like a song can make a very messy time in my life feel very neat. I like that box of a song when they're extending to that. The box of the album makes a period of my life feel very complete and, you know, framed, I guess, is the right word for it. Did you see that before you were writing songs? Or have you always been writing? No, I didn't.

14:16But then I didn't maybe have any problems, you know. I only started writing when I was 18. Prior to that, life, you know, things were fine. My life's not being bad. I'm not saying that. I just didn't have anything particularly catastrophe. But as you grow up, you'll have to pay... Yeah, all that stuff. Pretty carefree until you're about 18. Yeah, that was it. So then I discovered a reason to write at 18, which I think is probably the right time to start. Anyway, if you're writing pre-18, then I have no idea what you're going to do. So that was it. How does that work live? When you're talking about crafting the track listing to keep it a continuous thread, do you try and keep that in the live show? Well... Can you? Oh, no, I mean, thematically, no.

15:01That's much less relevant. I think the idea of a live show is just as fun to make the set list. But you're more like you're making a mix tape. You know, you're like taking people hopefully on a journey. And similarly, you can do that with a record as well. But you have to think much more about pacing, where you're allowed to have a dip. You do that on a record too, actually. I mean, it is a similar process, but I guess we're putting together like an hour and 35 minutes as opposed to 40 minutes on a record. But, yeah, similarly, it needs to be thought out. It needs to have a flow and a pace, definitely. Are there certain songs that you end up playing every night that you find? Like, I've heard you really were going to write it in interviews like Modern Leper or those...

15:48Yeah, they're... ...a form. I mean, Keep Yourself Warm has taken a year off, so that's gone. Now, why... For me, it... For me, we weren't a bit thin. We played it every night for, I don't know, when did I write it? Like, six years or something. I mean, it's popular. But to me as well, having written this new record, we played it a couple of times alongside the new material, and it felt like a kid had written it or something. Because I wrote it when I was like... I was probably 22, 23 maybe? And... Well, I wrote sort of the majority of it when I was that age, and then kind of finalised it later on.

16:33But, yeah, it just felt really immature next to the new stuff, and we were all sick of it anyway, so it seemed like the right thing to do. But there's certain songs... The Mother and Leper will always stay. You know, old-fashioned would be silly to leave it out. It's just part of some things we do for ourselves. So, there are some you know works no matter where you play every night? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's right at the front of the set. In fact, those two come in order. Those two are one after another. And it's because you like them so much? Yeah, and it's because I know that the majority of our fans really like them that much as well. The reaction is great. It's a great start. Like, everyone's just like, okay, I've been fine. Yeah, it's good. But, yeah, I mean, once we've found the set list for a tour,

17:19we'll make minor changes, but it usually stays pretty. I mean, it's amazing how you're fucking with a set list can actually make a show bad. I don't know, like, I don't... Does that happen? Yeah, yeah, we've found like real dips and shows where we knew it was our mistake to put the... And how do you know that? I mean, I'd say you can barely see the audience half the time. So how do you... Do you like hear them playing? You feel it. You just feel it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's really... I suppose it just comes with experiences as you can sort of feel use. I hate that feeling when you're like, oh, no, I might be losing some of them. And it's important to like try and keep everyone in. And you can... I don't know. It's very difficult to describe. Like, you just feel the room drop. And what have you learned as a performer to flip that move?

18:05Well, interaction, like, you know, talking, I've found, you know, that can turn a show around completely because then the audience feels like a different connection on another level. They're getting something. If an audience feels like they're getting something that no other city has gotten, I mean, just to me, like, you know, some of the best times are when things go wrong, like something breaks and then I'll be like, you know, give me an acoustic, I'll play this song. And that's not happened any other night. And the show just turns around because something fucked up. That's kind of my favorite moment, you know, when something unexpected happens. And that, you know, like talking to the audience, and I love it when people shout at me.

18:53Like, it's great. That makes that thing unique and you're able to play off that and everyone can interact. And that makes it more difficult, the larger the venue you get to, but... Yeah, I still try and keep as much of that as I can, you know, it's important. And Andrew and I were talking before about finishing, this is a little autobics, I don't want to get this in before you gotta go, about finishing songs and knowing when a song is finished. Yeah. Like, I have the hardest time when I edit video of knowing, okay, I gotta leave this as done. So how do you know when it's done and just say it's finished now? Well, it's finished when it's mastered. Okay. I think, you know, I think that's when you actually seal it off. For us, this time around, we did, by working with a producer that we did, Leo Abrahams, he...

19:41Oh, hi, is that... Oh, thank you very much. That's great. Okay. Thank you. Is it sugar or is that...? Oh, no, that'll be fine. I've got bunnies. Leo was very good at putting a full stop on the process when he thought we'd done enough or put enough on the song and he let us know. Which I've not been very good at in the past, you know, like how I can get a bit excessive with sonic layers and I learnt a lot from him in that way. So I think, you know, it's the hardest thing to do and I think for me, I need someone else to say something to stop. And who in the band would do that best, do you think?

20:26Andy would do that. Andy would do that. He's a minimalist. And then obviously when we worked with Leo, he did that a lot as well. But, you know, on previous albums, I had nobody telling me that, you know, especially in the winter of mixed drinks. The one before this was just like ridiculous. I went way overboard on the layers and I think the album suffered as a result. Really? Oh, yeah. Did you strip it down live then? Or did you try and take some of the lyrics? Well, we had no choice. Yeah, they have to. But I think as a result, the songs kind of shine through a lot more strongly. But yeah, I think, you know, the goal of this record was to keep the clarity and the space and let the songs breathe, if you like. So, yeah. And I think restraint was the key to that.

21:12Before I let you go, we do something called Five Questions. Five Quick Questions. Great. One Word Answers. Right. Rotor Studio. Studio. Lennon or McCartney. Lennon. When you hear a song, it usually hits you first. Lyrics, melody or rhythm? Rhythm. The song you've written your most proud of. The Modern Laughter. Oh, you get it right away? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And in one word, Brighton Rabbit. Tiring. That's good, but you're going to be on the road for the rest of the year. That's a great way.