Franz Take Cue From Dylan
Scottish rockers experiment with new beats, folk heroes
Franz Ferdinand will release their second album on October 4th, when the Scottish rockers will be halfway through a North American tour. Produced by the band and Rich Costey (Fiona Apple, Audioslave, the Mars Volta), the album -- like the band's platinum debut -- will be self-titled.
Recorded between rural Scotland and New York City, the album was mainly written between gigs. "We didn't want to go stagnant," says frontman Alex Kapranos. "We did a lot of writing when we were on the road. We just sat around whatever room we were in and worked it out." Tracks such as "Walk Away," "Do You Want To?" and "Evil Uneven" have already been tested live.
Inspired by a more seasoned traveler, Franz Ferdinand even tried their hand at writing a folk ballad. "I was reading [Bob Dylan's 2004 memoir] Chronicles, and he was talking about when he first came to the Bleecker Street scene in the early Sixties, and how they would go through newspapers and pick a character and base a song upon that character and represent him as a hero," Kapranos says. "'The Ballad of Billy the Kid' is very much like that: In reality, Billy the Kid just stole, but in the song, he steals from the rich and gives to the poor. That's fantastic." On the track "The Fallen," Kapranos gives the same treatment to a friend who he says "did a few things that caused him to be almost a social outcast -- he'd fallen from grace. He's a very enigmatic character."
While unafraid to reach way back for influences, the band was also looking for ways to refine and broaden their dance-driven, angular pop. "I liked that the first album was quite concise and that it had one sound that ran all the way through," Kapranos says. "But, with this new album, we felt that we had to make it a bit more three-dimensional and a little more thrilling. Some elements are probably heavier. We experimented with lots of different rhythms, rather than just keeping a disco beat going through."
The track "Walk Away" is clearly Franz Ferdinand, but "more dramatic, and more emotionally bare," says Kapranos. "On the first record, some of the emotions were a little guarded." He borrowed the lyrics for "Do You Want To?" from a friend's drunken rant at a party. "It's that sort of little thing that tickles you -- and then instead of just telling your pals about it, you turn it into a song."
As for life since their 2004 breakout, Kapranos insists that not much has changed. "When I went back to Glasgow, it was almost like I hadn't been away," he says. "I was going out to parties with pretty much the same set of people I was hanging out with before we went on tour, before the album came out, and they talked to me exactly the same way. It's not as if we decided to abandon our whole lives for some facile celebrity lifestyle."
Franz Ferdinand's North American tour dates:
9/20: Chicago, Aragon Ballroom
9/21: Minneapolis, Target Center
9/22: Kansas City, MO, Uptown Theatre
9/23: St. Louis, The Pageant
9/25: Austin, Austin City Limits
9/27: Denver, Fillmore Auditorium
9/28: Magna, UT, Great Salt Air
10/1: Seattle, Paramount Theatre
10/2: Seattle, Paramount Theatre
10/3: Portland, OR, Rose Garden Arena
10/4: Vancouver, BC, Orpheum
10/6: San Francisco, Bill Graham Civic Auditorium
10/7: Los Angeles, Greek Theatre
10/9: San Diego, SDSU Open Air Theatre
10/11: Las Vegas, The Joint
10/17: New York, The Theater at MSG
10/18: Toronto, Ricoh Centre
ALEX MAR AND LAUREN GITLIN
(Posted Jul 11, 2005)
