Search - The Fray :: Scars & Stories

Lacey P. (Radical) from GOSHEN, IN
Reviewed on 4/14/2014...

I first fell in love with The Fray when I heard "How To Save A Life" on the TV show Scrubs. I then discovered I was already in love with their song Over My Head I just had no idea who it was.
That was two albums ago. Their freshmen album.

Scars and Stories is different from their other two albums. I bought this album on the first day it came out, not even listening to the singles released because I like to wait for the surprise. What I heard completely surprised me. It wasn't a huge change, but yet it was evident. The song beats are a lot more upbeat. I'll give you a run down of my personal opinions.

1. Heartbeat
I love this song. The cover of this album looks like their running, and right away I feel like this is a great song to run to (not that I do (-: ) To me this song is about a guy singing to his girl. A girl who has been through terrible things.
"Oh you got a fire and it's burning in the rain/ Thought that it went out, but it's burning just the same/And you don't look back, not for anything"..."I wanna kiss your scars tonight, baby"
And that is something I can relate to which is what you ultimately want in a song.

2. The Fighter
This song just reminds me of Rocky. He's a boxer that I know of. That's the only reason why. But ultimately this song is about a fighter who falls in love, after years of loneliness. He goes in for one last fight, that breaks him to a point of where he is going to die.
"What breaks your bones / Is not the load you're carrying / What breaks you down/ Is all in how you carry" that line is something that I feel everyone needs to live by. Everything can be better or worsened by your view of it. He's always felt alone and now he's dying knowing he is loved.

3. Turn Me On
Right away I know what you're thinking. I thought the same thing. We were both right. Yes this is a song about a boy and girl ahem "coming together" but it's The Fray so it's super sweet and nice. Nothing like any rap song you'll ever hear.

4.Run for Your Life
I cannot even express my feelings about this song. It's probably my favorite on the album. It is so heartbreaking. My heart breaks every single time I hear it. Just go listen to it. If you choose to listen to one song on this album, let it be this.
"You can only hold back the river so long"

5. The Wind
Everyone interprets a song differently. But to me this is a song about a guy loosing the girl he loves and he is waiting desperately for her to come back.
"I try to kiss the emptiness, I lost the line between the sky and sea"

6.1961
I'm not sure, but I believe this song is about brothers going to war. The first going to WW2. The third going to Afghanistan (perhaps not Afghanistan.) That's as much as I can pick up.

7. I Can Barely Say
Okay I may be totally off, but this is how I relate.
We don't always act like ourselves around everyone. Along the way, you loose yourself, but eventually you want to stop suppressing the person you really are inside. This song is basically asking, if I'm myself, will everyone run away? Will anyone love me?

8. Munich
Lying in a 17 mile tunnel miles deep beneath the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, Switzerland, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator. It was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) with the aim of allowing physicists to test the predictions of different theories of particle physics, particularly for the existence of the "God Particle," which holds everything together. So what has this to do with the titular city of Munich, which is a few hundred miles away from the collider? Simply the song was birthed in the German city- it started with a little guitar riff that Isaac Slade wrote there - and the band turned it into a song at a sound check. Slade told Denver Westword: "We were doing a show in Munich, and I was reading a story about the neighboring particle collider they'd been working on in Switzerland and France. They're searching for the limit...they're standing on the edge of everything we know in science and trying to figure out what makes up 90 percent of the mass of a molecule and how it relates to the world."

9. Here We Are
This song is basically letting yourself be yourself with the person you love

10. 48 to Go
During an interview with Jim Shearer on VH1's Big Morning Buzz Live , singer Isaac Slade revealed that this song was inspired by a road trip he and his then girlfriend, now wife, Anna took from Denver, Colorado to Los Angeles. They attempted a shortcut through a mountain range and as a consequence got lost and ended up 600 miles off course; as Isaac Slade put it "...[we were] two states in and forty-eight states to go."

11. Rainy Zurich
(From Joe King) So being in a beautiful city, I decided to go outside and walk in the rain, and so I just got outside, and pretty much, I felt like I was the only one out in the city. It was probably eleven at night, I was walking through the alleyways and streets of Zurich, soaking wet. I got back to the room and started writing. I was missing home and missing feeling.

12. Be Still
This is another song I connected to immensely. I heard it played on CWs "The Vampire Diaries" one of their friends were dying (of course) and this song was playing. Basically it's saying after I dye I'll always be there for you.
Perfect song for a funeral.