Q&A with Frightened Rabbit - Broke and Breaking

Indie rock is a mileau typically reserved for the young and people who want to be young. Over the past year I've watched one band bridge the gap between those who seek out new music and those who think all the music that's worth hearing has already been made: Frightened Rabbit.



After they released their sophomore album in April of 2008, Frightened Rabbit instantly became the darling of Pitchfork Media. 'The Midnight Organ Fight' was dubbed the "Best Album of the Year Thus Far." Catchy tracks such as "Modern Leper" transform heartbreak into rock and roll.




Make no mistake about it - this band is poised to break big in '09. Just one year ago, I saw them perform in a tiny Williamsburg venue called Death By Audio - a scuzzy unfinished building with cans of beer for sale out of an ice chest. They were opening for the more established Enon. Saturday night, Frightened Rabbit headlined a sold out show at the Bowery Ballroom, and I was lucky enough to spend 30 minutes interviewing drummer Grant Hutchinson (he's the one lying down on the bench in the above picture). Hutchinson discussed what it's like to be on the verge of breaking, and being too broke to pay the rent.

How do you get along on tour?
We have this unspoken rule in the band that we don’t speak during the days because the days can be long and everyone can get on each other’s nerves. We spend 24 hours together, but we’ve never had any physical fall outs.

Who’s the feistiest member of the band?
I don’t want to say me but I’m probably it. I’m not great in the morning which is obviously not good considering the amount of driving you have to do in the U.S., but none of us are particularly angry. We’re all pretty mellow people.

You have a sound that makes grown men want to wet their pants in excitement. How did you develop your sound?
There’s a definite Scottish folk influence for obvious reasons. Scott is the songwriter and he was listening to a lot of country and Americana. A lot of it is directly from Scotland. The rain and the gray days and the miserable nation that we are kind of helps. Live we try to put as much energy into it as we can and hope that the crowd feeds off of it as well.

You recorded “The Midnight Organ Fight” with in-demand producer Peter Katis. What was it like recording with him?
The first album we did in Glasgow with our friends, more like a demo. To go from that to Peter’s house is a kind of music producer, music geek heaven. He’s collected all this gear over many years and he’s just a big inspirational producer … I know through Interpol records and the National he’s got this sound that’s very individual for him, which I think is important on Midnight Organ Fight definitely. You can attribute the way it sounds to him.

You stayed in Peter’s house while you recorded. Did you do anything to piss off him or his wife?
What Peter does is he’s a big hockey fan. He goes out to play hockey once or twice a week and basically he gets his aggression out. He plays hockey and beats up his friends on the ice. So when he’s in the studio he’s a fairly mellow person.

Before signing with FatCat, you almost signed with a major label. What’s the story?
It’s this label called Fiction which is a subsidiary of Universal. They courted us for awhile and led us on. In the end they put a deal on the table that just wasn’t right for us. It was really non-committal. They were the ones that were going to be making money. We said we weren’t happy with their deal, so they said see you later. It was pretty horrible at the time. It was not a nice thing to go through but looking back they kind of saved us. I think this past year we’ve had with FatCat has been the best.

When did the band get its first big break? Was it when John Krasinski (“Jim” from The Office) discovered you?
That was probably our proudest moment of the year. Last summer we watched The Office constantly on our laptops.

Have you met him yet?
When we played in LA in October we emailed him and said yeah we’re playing we’ll stick you on the guest list. He never showed up, but he emailed us the next day and said he was stuck at work and he was slowly watching the time tick toward stage time. We haven’t met him yet, but it’s on our To Do list, maybe swap some autographs.

Which version of The Office is better? American or UK?
Oh, ah, gee. It’s a hot debate, this one. They’re so different now, I think the UK office still has its own sort of identity ‘cause they’re just completely different, but I think I found the US office more enjoyable to watch. There’s not as many cringe moments. I’ll stay diplomatic on that one and say they both have their merits.

What’s the worst job you’ve had trying to make it as a struggling musician?
I haven’t really had to do any bad jobs to be honest. I worked in Urban Outfitters, and it wasn’t great. Working at the supermarket, at the till, was probably the worst.

Andy (keyboardist) was telling us earlier that he used to work on the train lines basically him and this other guy and their job was to sort of throw these lines up onto the wires above the trains to cut the power so people could actually walk on the tracks and it wasn’t his responsibility to do the job. He was with the guy carrying the cables. Night shift. One night the guy said you give it a shot, so he threw them up and short-circuited the whole thing. He never went back and caused several thousand pounds worth of damage to the train lines, and I think the guy he was working with got demoted. That wasn’t a great job for Andy.

Billy (guitarist) used to put the metal bits on dental floss. You know the thing you snap the dental floss off with… Billy used to put them onto the plastic casing.

How does someone get that job?
There was a dental floss factory near where we grew up.

Have you experienced a Quarter Life Crisis?
Yeah, just before we left, I had to move home to my parent’s house because I can’t afford to have a flat in Glasgow. I was packing my boxes and thinking I really miss having a 9-5 job and having a wage coming into my bank every month that I can afford to pay my rent with and buy cigarettes. But then you go on stage for 45 minutes and it pulls you back in and you know exactly why you’re doing this.

Is the rock and roll life what you imagined it would be?
Absolutely not. It’s not what I expected. For our band, few girls, no drugs, no smashing up TVs, windows anything like that. It’s a job. It’s not paid well at the moment. We don’t have a tour bus yet either so we’re living out of a Ford 15-seater. Sticking all your clothes in a pillow case and hoping that the next hotel has a laundry that you can wash your clothes with. We don’t have a crew to load our gear or anything like that…

We stayed with our manager the other night and there were four of us. Most NYC apartments are really small so we were sleeping on the floor and looking at each other like in four days’ time we’re going to play a sold out show at the Bowery, and here we are sleeping on the floor in NYC. Hopefully we are nearing the end of it anyway. But I wouldn’t change it for anything.

You hear these bands who are now in tour buses and have all the perks and they say I wish we could go back to the days of playing the dirty rock and roll venues and sleeping in a van, and you just think, no you don’t. You don’t. That’s a lie. We’ll swap with you. We’ll take your bus and you take our van and see how you manage.

When will you start recording a new album?
We get home on the 4th of February and we’ll take time off. Scott, the songwriter, is going to go away for a month and try to get some demos together and then we’ll get together and solidify the demos and hopefully have it recorded by June. We want to get back into it and not lose momentum. I don’t like waiting three years for my favorite band to release an album. When you think back to the ‘60s and ‘70s and how many albums were released, like two albums a year for a band. We want to get it out as soon as possible, hopefully later this year or early 2010.

Where does Scott go to write?
He’s actually going to a friend of ours’ house on the east coast of Scotland by the sea and he’s going to shut himself away for a month. It’s not like getting inspiration from the rolling hills and the sandy beach or anything like that. He just has to be alone and take the time to do it.

You’re a band that’s about to make it big. What do you want people to know about you?
Scott and I are eczema sufferers and it’s not easy being on tour with eczema. That’s what we want them to know. We have to get medicated cream and stuff.

And also that people should never stop approaching us and staying hi because that’s the most important thing about being in a band is speaking to the people who are paying your wages. We never want to be diva like at all and we never will be.