Catching Up With… Frightened Rabbit
The Winter of Mixed Drinks, the soon-to-be-latest from Scottish troubadours Frightened Rabbit, is the follow-up to the band’s 2008 experiments with intimacy: a studio effort focused on the regretful nature of post-breakup hookups (The Midnight Organ Fight) and a live album that stripped the band of its electric guitars (Liver! Lung! FR!). Winter contains some of the band’s most open-air atmospherics to date, and combined with nautical metaphors and burial imagery, it sounds like an emergence from deep hibernation. Paste recently spoke with frontman Scott Hutchison about letting his voice get lost, touring with his favorite band and how one tiny Scottish fishing village shaped the new record.
Paste: Your last tour of 2009 was opening for Modest Mouse in the U.K. and Ireland, though you guys really have been relentlessly touring for the past two years. Since you don’t typically write songs while on the road, did you ever feel creatively restrained by the mechanic nature of touring?
Scott Hutchison: I don’t feel restrained in terms of wanting to write, yet being unable to—because I just decided I never wanted to write on the road. Touring is not a very creative process, and my mind almost needs to switch between different settings for touring and writing. So when in tour mode, creativity is usually switched off. I suppose this means ideas burst out with more force when I go back to the writing process.
Paste: Around the time of The Midnight Organ Fight‘s release, both you and critics had said that Frightened Rabbit had been experiencing a slow, but steady growth, in both musicianship and number of members. What do you have to say of the band’s growth now?
Hutchison: It has continued in that same way as far as I can tell. There haven’t been any huge, earth-shattering movements in the history of the band, and I rather like it that way. When a band is the finished article from the outset, where do they have to go? In many ways it has been nice to have some headroom to get better and better at what we do.
Paste: Around that time also, you also kept citing The Twilight Sad as one of your favorite bands. Fast-forward to 2009, and you guys were touring the U.S. with them. How did that feel?
Hutchison: They have been good friends of ours for a couple of years now, so to tour with them was an absolute pleasure. There’s nothing better than watching one of your favorite bands perform each night and have the songs you love take on a new life from town to town.