The Story Of Trust Me

Have you ever wondered what Trust Me was about? Well, despite the fact that a song can mean anything and everything at the same time, here's what the song was written about, accoring to Joe King, guitarist and back-up vocalist of The Fray:

"It's the story from the early days of The Fray - when we didn't have a label and you didn't know who to trust, and people were telling us which direction to go in. It's a song about the feeling of almost being alone, despite there be a lot of people around."

All that said, the song is about trying to follow the correct path, trying to make their dreams true, but having people driving you crazy while all you try to do is to do the right thing. After all, that's what happens in life whenever you try to do something you'd never done before.

The story of The Fighter

Hello! What’s up? Today, I’m going to tell you the story behind another Fray song: The Fighter. First of all, the song was released in 2012, and belongs to the album: Scars & Stories. This song is kind of peculiar, just saying. And that’s because the song is probably the unique Fray song which was first started by seeing a picture.

The song was written by both Isaac Slade and Joe King, as usual. As Isaac Slade adds, he saw a picture of a boxing fight in a newspaper, and from there it all came. In the picture, there was a boxer fallen in the fight, and a girl surprised of seeing his man fallen and another boxer, which was like: “I didn’t mean to kill him”. After that, Isaac put on the piano the picture and started writing the song. Anyway, he started writing the song as if the boxer was fighting with his doubts; as Isaac says: “It’s a scary thing to face your doubts, especially in a relationship”. Then, Isaac also adds this: “I think it’s just like if you don’t face death, you can’t really live. If you don’t face divorce, you can’t really stay married. It’s not an ‘I do’, and then you’re set. It’s an ‘I do’, everyday. And when those doubts come in you can’t stuff them, you can cram them, ignore them, but they’re like hungry dogs in the basement clamoring to get out. So what I meant to communicate was that doubts are ok. Struggling in a relationship is ok. Wondering if there’s somebody better is ok. Because then you choose to stay, instead of shrugging your shoulders, saying it’s good enough. If you carry those doubts secretly hidden in the corner of your chest, they’ll kill you. They’ll kill everything, man. But if you kind of bring them out in the open and talk about them and sort through them and figure out where they’re coming from and face them, it’s scary sometimes; sometimes the marriage ends or the relationship ends, but sometimes you stay married for the rest of your life and it’s real”. These are the words of Isaac Slade who said that in an interview. 

        To conclude, the song has a quote which really reflects what Slade said: “What breaks your bones is not the load you’re carrying, what breaks you down is all in how you carry it”, and Joe King added also some things about that: “we all have something that we’re inevitable going to be carrying with us, but how you carry it is the difference. I think that if you carry it in front of you or behind you or if you’re carrying everything, the point of how you’re actually carrying your load is all the difference. I have stuff that I’m carrying that I’ll carry the rest of my life. Not that they’re bad, but I have them here. They’re almost like good things now that I’m carrying with me from the destruction”. This was also said in the same interview as Isaac’s last paragraph, but this was said by Joe. 

Well, I guess there’s not anything more to say about this song. Here you can watch a video for the song posted in The Fray’s channel, I don’t know if it’s considered official or not anyway… 

The story of Hundred

Hey guys! I know it’s been a long time since I last wrote a post talking about the story behind any song by The Fray. But, here we go; I’m going to talk about a song’s story again. Today’s song is Hundred. The song was written by Isaac Slade, and the story behind it is this: it’s about Isaac’s ex-girlfriend. It’s about the break-up, and there was some polemic with it. The reason of the polemic was that Isaac decided to play it to a girl he liked called Anna. It seems like she didn’t like that, because she turned her back and left. After all, she wasn’t that angry, because they got married in 2006. Here you can listen to the song:  

The story of Be Still

         This song was written by Isaac Slade. It was written in 2011 after his little brother (Micah, 21 years old that year) phoned him at 4 A.M. saying him he felt helpless. Isaac talked to him for a while, and then both went to sleep. At the next morning, while having breakfast, he caught his guitar and started composing a song. As he says: “it wasn’t like writing, the lyrics just came. It never comes that easy, just maybe with the song Happiness”. Then he went to the studio and recorded the song. Even he didn’t mean to have it on the record; he just wanted to record it to his brother.  Well, finally they put it on the record, but the original one; as Joe said: “don’t change it, it’s perfect”.

Here you can listen to a live solo version of the song in the Today Show:

The story of 48 To Go

This song is about Isaac Slade and his now wife, Anna. They were just dating and they were in a travel. They travelled by car to go to a friend’s party. In their way there, they got lost. Isaac said in a concert that it was such as experience.

Here you can listen to the song:

 

 

The story of Over My Head (Cable Car)

This song is about Isaac Slade’s relationship with his brother, Caleb. As the singer adds “we were two different personalities, forced to be together”. Caleb was in the band when it was first formed, but he was fired because he wasn’t good enough. This is one of the biggest reasons of their fights. As brothers, they were fighting all the time, and, after Caleb’s graduation, he distanced. Isaac decided the best thing to do was fight it out, and talk. Now, they don’t have more arguments and are really friends. Actually, the first name of the song was "Cable Car", which is Caleb's nickname.

Here you are the official video of the song, where Isaac’s little brother, Micah, is acting. He told Isaac he was just going to act if he gave him an X-Box, and he did.

 

The story of Where The Story Ends

This song was written by Isaac Slade and Joe King. The song is about when Isaac and Anna, his wife, moved together when they weren’t married. Isaac has said that he felt like if that didn’t work, he was ruining that girl’s life (Anna was living with him in Colorado, and she is from Seattle). In the other hand, Isaac had to change some lyrics of the song, because his wife told him that he was just talking about how he felt, not about how she felt.

Here you are the piano version of the song:

   

The story of You Found Me

The Fray – You Found Me

This song was released in 2008, but the songwriting started about more than one year before. It is a song written by Isaac Slade and Joe King, but has more Isaac’s stories, it could have said. Isaac wrote on their official page about it: “You found me is a tough song for me. It’s about the disappointment, the heartache; the let down that comes with life. It’s about the feelings and the hope I still have, buried deep inside my chest”. Also he has talked about it in lots of interviews; he said that there was a moment, when they were on the road, that it was like phone call after phone call, tragedy after tragedy, of people close to him. He said: “Undeserving, good people”. His songwriting of this song has got a progress: at the first time, it was like: “I’m angry for something that happened to me, to my family and to my friends”; but at the end, it was like: “I’m angry but I still believe, help me hold both in my hands. And if I’m going to call myself Christian, if I’m going to be a believer without being sarcastic I need to have some answers: why the good people instead of the bad one? You know, help me make sense of it” He said that if he dies or something, it is what he’d said to God. Also he said that if he had that meeting with God, it wouldn’t be a totally nice one. Here you are an awesome version of the song played in a stairwell: 

The story of Enough For Now

The Fray – Enough For Now

This song, according to “The Fair Fight Documentary” is Isaac Slade’s mother story. Isaac said in a concert that her life was “perfect” to pull it together in a song. Well, the band hasn’t added more about the song. Either way, if we stop at the lyrics, what we can see is this: Isaac’s grandfather wanted a son, for taking his surname, and had a daughter. And that was hard for her daughter (Isaac’s mother). The song seems have a comforting message from Isaac to her after his death. Here you can listen to this awesome version of the song: 

The story of How To Save A Life

The Fray – How To Save A Life

This song is about the experience of the lead Singer of the band (Isaac Slade) as a mentor in a camp of troubled teens in Denver, called Shelterwood. One of his friends was the head teacher there, and he spent there a week.

There, he was the mentor of a 17-years-old, who told him his story. He was addicted to a lot of different drugs and alcohol, in recovery. His story was shocking, according to Isaac. He told him that there were a lot of people who tried to help him, save him. According to the guy, as enemies; saying: “if you don’t stop taking drugs I stop talking to you”; when all he needed was a friend, someone who was in his team.

That story made him think, who admits know lots of people with the same attitude: “I’m doing something wrong, that I know is going to hurt me, o hurt the people I love. And they try to help me and I just ignore them”.  He says that, sometimes, is difficult to know what to say, when to say, and how much to push somebody until this person stops taking your phone calls. Isaac Slade says that “if I don’t know you, and I tell you not to do something because you’re going to hurt yourself; we don’t know each other, you don’t care about me, and I don’t care about you. But if your best friend tells you to stop, because you’re going to hurt yourself, you should trust that person. Those are the people you’re going to hold on the rest of your life”. 

According to him, that’s a frustrating situation of being a parent: they love their kid so much, and they want him to be happy and healthy; and they were watching him killing himself slowly or all at once. But this story didn’t end up that bad as it might be thought, the guy got help, he was in the place to. And he started reaching again those people. This was told by Slade in an interview from 2007, where he also said that he still talks to him.

That story also made him think about all the relationships he has lost because of the decision he has made, and how he’d like people to talk to him if he’s doing something wrong.  

In the other hand, an interviewer asked Slade if he saw a lot of this in his neighborhood. He told him that he grew up in a protected air. But his response was: “I had friends in who tried to commit suicide, forget about live… whether it was throw alcohol or any of that stuff” He says he’s not like some “savior” or something similar, that they wrote the song because he thought unable to reach those people.  

The Singer admits have cried with the song live. Even, Joe King, guitarist of the band, said in a documentary of the album with the same name; that Isaac Slade started crying while they were playing the song in the studio one time. Either way, they didn’t stop, they carried on playing and then, Joe came to Isaac, like “what’s wrong?”

There’s a happy ending, or not? That’s what they asked Isaac in the same interview. It has been told that the guy survived, but it doesn’t mean every history related to it ends up the same.

Is there a happy ending, or not? That ¡s what they asked the singer in the same interview, mentioned before. It is already told that the guy survived, but it doesn’t mean that every single story related to the song ends up like this. The song is open to interpretation, and the singer meets people every concert. “There are people that tell me their own stories, and for them it’s about kill themselves, or they got someone who committed suicide… it’s not a happy ending, it’s not like a story book conclusion for a lot of people’s, a lot of people’s life”, recalls Slade.

And, in the end, Slade talks about How To Save A Life as the most relevant personal confession he has ever written in a song, that, told by Isaac Slade, is a lot.