Collin Erie for AOL Music

Despite their near-ubiquity on radio over the past few years, the Fray remains one of those bands that is heard more than seen. In most cities, the four members can walk down the street unrecognised. And that suits them just fine.

"Well, there's a small satisfaction we get out of being recognised at a mall," admits co-founder/lead singer Isaac Slade. "But that's really small. The rest of it is, like, awesome that people know our music more than our faces and I think we'd like to keep it that way. The advice we've gotten from people who have been in it for 30, 40 years has always been be known for your music if you're a musician and try to keep it there."

Slade and bandmates Joe King, Ben Wysocki and Dave Welsh talked to AOL Sessions about life, liberty and the pursuit of clean socks.

Full interview

AOL: Your new hit 'You Found Me' is about a conversation with God. If you could ask God one thing, what would you ask?

JOE: Well, why do I have nipples?

BEN: That's a good one. I'm not going to be able to top that one, so I'm going to quit now.

AOL: What prompted the song?

ISAAC: 'You Found Me' came from just hearing all this bad news from friends. It also happened the same time and I knew these people really well. They were good people. It's not like they deserved it or something, and it just didn't makes sense. I thought if I could have that one opportunity to like sit down with them and hash it out, that's what Id say. It's not fair, it doesn't make sense, it's not right. I know plenty of other people that would deserve it more than these people and they're doing fine, you know.

AOL: What's too personal to write about? Where do you draw the line?

BEN: I think the beauty in art is that you can kind of hide in it or hide behind it because some of our songs are just about as personal as it gets, and everyone just accepts it. Really, you could be pouring out the most horrible thing you ever went through, and like 3 million people buy it at Wal-Mart.

AOL: Isaac, there aren't that many pianists in rock. Who is the hippest pianist you can think of?

ISAAC: 100 years ago there was a guy named Rachmaninoff. He was this Russian cat. He had these enormous hands and he could play these chords that nobody else could play so he had to go on tour with his music otherwise it wasn't played right or something. And all of his contemporaries said he was a circus music composer or something 'cause he was huge all over the place, and now his music is like some of the hardest classical music out there.

AOL: What's the key to staying sane on the road when you're away from your friends and family?

JOE: Clean socks. Clean underwear. I think staying connected to the people we are closest to is a huge way of staying sane, 'cause staying in close contact with them keeps you grounded. You kind of become like this entity when you're touring and it's like this bubble, and real life almost disappears because you're almost unplugged from anything else in your own little thing. So the more that you have connection with those people, that's kind of where you can get grounded.

DAVE: It's funny, you know in the bubble that we kind of create for ourselves on the road, it's still really easy to become apathetic and to lose the ability to even care about what you're doing that night, which is ironic because that's the whole reason why you're doing it -- the whole reason why you left your family. That's one of the things that keeps it real on the road: to every night put effort into a show, with the intention of making the best show of the tour, and I mean, if you can't do that, then might as well get off the road I guess.

AOL: How did being out on the road so much between the last one album and this one affect the writing on this one?

ISAAC: I didn't get any alone time on that last record because I was waiting for somebody to give it to me, and then I found out you have to make it yourself. I felt like I always had a phone call, email or something or somebody or a crowd, for years, you know. I don't say it as a complaint. I just say it as like a learning process for me. It's incredibly important to stay connected, but at the same time it's like if you don?t have a minute to reset your brain ... I was always on the go, so a lot of that burnout got on the record.

AOL: Is there a song that particularly addresses that on the new album?

ISAAC: 'Happiness' is probably a lot of that loneliness. That one was actually written about my then-girlfriend who was in Australia for 6 months, and I wanted to marry her and she was 12,000 miles away or something. It was a funny thing, like being in love and being in so much pain at the same time.

AOL: What is the biggest thing you've learned since this all began?

JOE: I actually need these guys while I'm on the road. You're brothers, you know, and you fight sometimes, then you can't stand each other, but then you want to be around them, you want to have dinners and you want to bond. I learned that they are so important for me to last in this.

ISAAC: The stuff that hits there closest is my personal life. I learned the importance of community and what it means to have people that know everything and still stay, instead a bunch of people that know something and will not go away. So, getting there, I had to learn how to say no to a lot of things and no to a lot of people, and let a lot of people down. But for every 10 no's there's like a very solid yes that I got to say to close friends and close family.

DAVE: I think there's that old colloquial expression 'No man is an island' type of thing. It's kind of a bummer to find that out for me over the last couple of years because I grew up reading Hemingway, and he is the island, you know. He literally sat on a boat and fished for like the last half of his life, and it was such a romantic idea to be that. But over the last three years, you realize in a practical world, doing what we're doing, it's an impossible task. You're stuck in some city with three other people that should be some of the closest people in your life and you're living this romantic idea that you don't need them. It was a very pragmatic thing to learn.

BEN: Maybe we should go fishing.

DAVE: In conclusion, I'd like to buy a fishing pole.

ISAAC: Can I come?

DAVE: Sure.

ISAAC: Sweet.

--Melinda Newman