Pod Insights 60 Songs That Explain the '90s “How to Save a Life”—The Fray About this episode This week, Rob examines the hallowed art of employing songs within the soundtrack of a crucial TV scene to emotionally manipulate the viewing audience. Along the way, he evokes classic moments from ‘General Hospital’ , 'ER', and ‘Scrubs’ before ultimately expounding on the highly effective use of the Fray’s “How to Save a Life” in ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ to tug on the proverbial heart strings. He’s then joined by The Ringer’s own Yasi Salek to shine a light on how the Fray’s hit song shaped her experiences while watching the dramatic events unfold at the fictional Seattle Grace Hospital.
Host: Rob HarvillaGuest: Yasi SalekProducers: Chris Sutton, Jonathan Kermah, Olivia Crerie, and Justin Sayles
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Transcript 12,883 words · 7 speakers
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1:39 Speaker 02 I just find it to be a little manipulative, you know? It's cheating. I get that it's a TV show. I get that it's not necessarily a prestige TV show. I get that it's a soap opera, alright? I get that it's a soap opera set in a hospital, which would naturally heighten the soap operatics, heighten the drama, heighten the melodrama, heighten the tragedy, heighten the emotional manipulation. I understand that just by watching this show, I have consented to being manipulated emotionally, but I'm a purist about these things. I have too much respect for hospital-based soap operas as a medium, as an art.
2:23 Speaker 02 These are my stories and I just think the storytelling, the performances, the action on screen should stand on its own and should convey all the sumptuous melodrama on its own without needing a flowery pop song blaring in the background to goad the audience into feeling one way or the other. That's cheating. Just let the actors cook.
2:49 Speaker 03 I can accept everything that you did.
2:53 Speaker 03 If you can accept. What I did. Of course. I want us to be together. So do I.
3:04 Speaker 02 Oh shit, Luke and Holly are getting back together. You remember back in the summer of 1982 when Luke and Holly first met on a camping trip after he caught her skinny dipping and they hooked up, but then it turns out Holly's a con artist. We're in the bustling city of Port Charles in upstate New York and these scammers had rolled into town claiming to be oil prospectors, right? And they ain't. But when Holly wants out of the scam, she gets kidnapped and whisked off to Vancouver. But don't worry, Luke and his buddy Robert get her back, but then Luke goes camping again and gets caught in an avalanche and is presumed dead. And by the time he gets back to town, Holly's married to his buddy Robert. But that's just the way the applesauce crumbles here on General Hospital.
4:02 Speaker 02 Yes, General Hospital, the beloved ABC soap opera that premiered in April 1963 and is still on the air. The 62-year-old active television program, General Hospital. This show's first episode aired the week after the first Beatles record came out. John F. Kennedy was alive. And ABC broadcast a new episode of this show today.
4:32 Speaker 02 You can watch that on Hulu tomorrow, but we're talking 1982 right now because Luke and Holly are getting back together. Holy shit. Luke and Holly are rekindling their star-crossed love affair down at the pier. You can tell it's the pier because of the wave sounds and the dinging buoys and whatnot. I wouldn't have minded one good tugboat porn somewhere in here just to really drive home the whole pier concept. Do you still love me? Oh, well, let the actors cook.
5:18 Speaker 02 But who's that singing in the background there? Why, it's Patty Austin. It's soul jazz, R&B, pop great Patty Austin, crooning her hit silky smooth 1981 Quiet Storm classic duet, Baby, comma, Come To Me alongside fellow soul jazz pop R&B great James Ingram. Baby Come To Me is their song. I mean Luke and Holly. It is canonically Luke and Holly's song. It appears frequently on General Hospital whilst these two lovebirds canoodle and whatnot. Great choice. Somebody listening to this right now was conceived to this song. That's gross, but it's accurate. Baby Come To Me first showed up on a Patty Austin album in
6:03 Speaker 02 1981, but once General Hospital started using it as Luke and Holly's theme music in 1982, the song hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1983. The General Hospital bump. It's a great song. It's emotionally manipulative and borderline cheating in this context, but it's cool. Ah, but Luke is already pulling away.
6:33 Speaker 02 I gotta side with Luke on this one. I don't trust Holly at all either. Meanwhile, Luke, if you recall, Luke has a very bushy eighties perm type majestic blonde hair. He looks like Yasified Art Garfunkel. That is a truly cursed combination of words and I apologize. And forget Holly, actually. Let's talk about Laura. Ooh. Luke's true love, Laura. Luke and Laura, whose televised wedding in a November 1981 episode of General Hospital received the highest ratings in daytime television history. Thirty million people watched Luke and Laura get married. That episode guest starred Elizabeth Taylor. Princess Diana sent champagne,
7:18 Speaker 02 but tragedy will soon befall our newlyweds. See, early in 1981, Luke and Laura had foiled a nefarious plot hatched by General Hospital supervillain Prince Mikos Ivanovich Kasadine to deep freeze Port Charles with his dastardly weather machine. I am neither making up nor exaggerating any of this. Prince Mikos Ivanovich Kasadine is basically the Bowser of General Hospital. This dude was gonna cause a giant snowstorm and freeze the whole town and then later the whole world. This dude's got an evil lair on a secret island off the coast of Venezuela. This show generally airs at three in the afternoon.
8:00 Speaker 02 This evil lair has a freeze room where multiple people are frozen solid and therefore killed. Among them, Prince Mikos Ivanovich Kasadine himself after Luke punches him into the freeze room while they are both wearing tuxedos. I'm in a tailspin here and I acknowledge that. But let me say this. General Hospital, I was not familiar with your game. I must admit that I did not, and in fact, I do not, watch General Hospital. I have no firsthand live as it aired experience of any of this. In my defense, when Luke and Laura got married, I was four years old, but I got no excuse for the rest of it. I have spent the last several-
8:42 Speaker 02 Hours perusing sixty two years of general hospital plotlines and I have encountered all manner of inspired narrative lunacy, but I'll tell you what I have not found. I have not found a single significant plot development that took place in the fucking hospital, not one person diagnosing or treating a serious illness or physical injury. My advice, if you ever find yourself in Port Charles, New York, which is a fictional location, but if you are ever in Port Charles, New York, don't get hurt like at all because ain't nobody got time for that shit. You are statistically more likely to be kidnapped by oil scammers
9:26 Speaker 02 and trafficked to Vancouver than you are to receive basic medical care at the general hospital. This shit is bananas. But yeah, shortly after the wedding, Laura gets kidnapped and is presumed dead for like two years. To paraphrase the notorious B I G, on this show, you're nobody till somebody presumes you're dead. And Luke rebounds with Holly, but his heart's clearly not in it. And he just got elected mayor of Port Charles, but otherwise he's just moping around when Laura returns and starts sneaking around unobserved in a fashionable hood like Princess Leia. And though he hasn't seen her yet, Luke can sense Laura's presence somehow because this is true love.
10:09 Speaker 03 I don't know what's happening, man. It's uh, had these little chills all afternoon. Strange considering the temperature. You have no idea how strange.
10:20 Speaker 02 Meanwhile, Laura's all dolled up like Shania Twain and lurking behind a rack of suit coats. But what's that song I hear? Who's that singing and emotionally manipulating me in the background? Why, it's Christopher Cross, the yacht rock Messiah behind such timeless jams as Ride Like the Wind and Sailing. And yes, think of Laura, which came out in nineteen eighty-three and became Christopher Cross's last top ten hit, in part because it also became Luke and Laura's theme song.
10:52 Speaker 02 Christopher did not write Think of Laura about General Hospital Laura. Turns out he wrote it about a real life college student named Laura Carter, who was killed by a stray bullet during a gang shootout in Columbus, Ohio. That is the second most upsetting piece of General Hospital trivia that I personally stumbled across. Do you want to hear the exact moment when Luke sees Laura and realizes she's still alive? This is semi loud and I'm almost positive that Christopher Cross song was not playing in the actual scene, but the song is a worthy addition to this Tik Tok. And also, does Luke sound just a little bit like goofy here?
11:42 Speaker 02 Oh my God.
11:47 Speaker 02 Didn't Luke sound a little like goofy? Mickey Mouse's friend with the floppy ears, like when goofy would ski off a mountain and go woo. My point is there's a precedent. My point is General Hospital helped set the standard for emotionally manipulative pop songs in hospital based soap operas. In 2011, on General Hospital, there's a big bus crash during a ski trip. Actually, the bus flies off a cliff and ejects all these kids out into the snow. The bus crash itself is not really depicted. This is a soap opera. Their budget is like $30. And later, there's a big montage set to Jeff Buckley's version of Hallelujah.
12:29 Speaker 02 Here's the part where one of the passengers dies and all the pissed off doctors rip off their masks and call it.
12:54 Speaker 02 Okay, so that scene took place in the fucking hospital. One scene depicting actual attempted medical care in 62 years. Generally, they'll forget it. At some point in my General Hospital tailspin, I thought, I wonder how Luke and Laura first met. I bet that was sweet and wholesome and memorable. And I looked it up and yo, I don't want to talk about General Hospital no more. What in tarnation? I regret this entire line of inquiry. I still talked about it for 20 minutes just now, but that doesn't mean I don't regret it. There's a precedent for emotionally manipulative pop songs in hospital-based soap operas. That was my point, and it's still my point. Hey, remember when Doug and Carol finally reunited on ER?
13:40 Speaker 02 Seattle, Seattle.
13:41 Speaker 04 That's it. You better hurry. Hurry in the morning.
13:49 Speaker 02 Oh shit, Doug and Carol are finally getting back together. Yes, that's ER, the blockbuster NBC hospital-based primetime soap opera that premiered in 1994. Yes, that's Carol, as in troubled nurse Carol Ross, played by Juliana Margulies. Yes, that's Doug, as in Dr. Doug Ross, the disconcertingly handsome pediatric fellow, played by George Clooney. Doug and Carol, they dated for a long time and considered getting married and having a kid, but Doug screwed up some stuff at work and left the ER and moved to Seattle. And then Carol found out she was pregnant with twins. And so she sent Doug a fax to inform him she was pregnant with twins, but he should stay in Seattle, and she was hoping he'd come back, but he didn't.
14:33 Speaker 02 A fax, like with a fax machine, like how the Pixies broke up. Anyway, Carol gave birth to twin girls on Thanksgiving, and now it's the year 2000, and Doug and Carol haven't seen each other in like a year, primarily because George Clooney is too famous to be on this show now. But Carol has realized they're soulmates, and she's got to get to Seattle ASAP, and she's rushing through the airport. But what's that song I hear? Who is that luxuriantly crooning in the background? Don Henley.
15:04 Speaker 02 That's who, Don Henley of the Eagles. The song is called "Take You Home", from Don Henley's 2000 solo album, Inside Job. "Take You Home" is no the end of the innocence, but what is? Meanwhile, good news, Carol made it on the plane to Seattle.
15:23 Speaker 02 You almost missed it. Yeah.
15:27 Speaker 02 I almost did.
15:34 Speaker 02 Relatively speaking, ER did not over-rely on emotionally manipulative pop songs, but when they got you, they got you good, right? Carol gets to Doug's house in Seattle, and first it looks like he's not home, but nah, he's just out back on the dock messing with his boat. I forget if there's an emotionally manipulative pop song playing at the end of The Shawshank Redemption, when Morgan Freeman finds Tim Robbins messing with his boat on the beach, but Don Henley's "The Boys of Summer" would have been a great choice for that scene. All right, Doug and Carol, let's get to smooching.
16:10 Speaker 04 Where are the girls? They're with my mom.
16:21 Speaker 02 Yeah, so now Doug and Carol are long gone, but ER rumbles merrily along. This show runs from 1994 to 2009, so an impressive 15 seasons, which means it almost made it 1/4 as long as General Hospital, which is still on the air. ER is, nonetheless, the second-longest-running primetime hospital-based soap opera in American television history, which brings us to the question. For 250 points, what is the first pop song ever played on Grey's Anatomy?
17:00 Speaker 02 Think about it. Just guess. It's a fantastic song, actually.
17:06 Speaker 05 Derek. Derek. Right, Meredith. Meredith. Yeah.
17:12 Speaker 05 Nice meeting you. Bye, Derek.
17:19 Speaker 02 Rilo Kylie, Portions for Foxes by Rilo Kylie, from their fabulous 2004 album, More Adventurous. If I don't get to see Rilo Kylie on their reunion tour, I'm gonna be super pissed. Just a grand slam opening salvo from Grey's Anatomy, which premiered on ABC on March 27th, 2005, and is still on the air and therefore is indeed the longest-running primetime hospital-based soap opera in American television history. Anyway, let's meet our new crop of super sexy and charismatic surgical residents, including Meredith, Izzy, George, and my favorite Christina,
18:01 Speaker 02 who are embarking on their first 48-hour shift at Seattle Grace Hospital. I sure hope all the knuckleheads in this hospital don't end up having sex with one another, because then there'd be no mystery left. Today, you are the doctors.
18:20 Speaker 02 The seven years you spend here as a surgical resident will be the best and worst of your life. Seven years. Not to quibble with you, noble Seattle Grace Chief of Surgery, Richard Weber, but try 21 years and counting. Richard Weber is still on Grey's Anatomy. So is Miranda. So is Meredith. Only 41 more years and Grey's Anatomy will catch up to where General Hospital is now, whereas General Hospital, 41 years from now, in 2066, will have been on the air for 102 years. Meanwhile, if I'm still alive at that point, I'm probably not too psyched about it. Anyway, the truly excellent and insidiously catchy Rilo Kylie jam,
19:03 Speaker 02 Portions for Foxes, is blaring away as we get our first look at our Grey's Anatomy heroes and anti-heroes, all of whom will get famous and a few of whom will eventually die. No spoilers. This is your starting line. This is your arena. How well you play?
19:25 Speaker 02 That's up to you. Like I said,
19:30 Speaker 02 I'm screwed. And then a bunch of hospital-based soap opera stuff happens in the 2005 pilot episode of Grey's Anatomy. All of it soundtracked by various, mostly innocuous, manipulative pop songs. What happens? Meredith is intimidated but super competent. George is intimidated but super incompetent. Christina is unintimidated, my favorite. Alex is a jerk. Miranda, the surgeon, is scary. Derek, the surgeon, is not scary, other than the fact that he just had sex with Meredith. Burke, the surgeon, is a scary jerk. And Izzy does rectal exams. And it all culminates with Derek performing a high-stakes surgery soundtracked by an especially emotionally manipulative pop song.
20:14 Speaker 05 All right, everybody. It's a beautiful night to save lives. Let's have some fun.
20:23 Speaker 02 Even better, it's an emotionally manipulative piano ballad, which allows for bonus emotional manipulation. You know this song? I didn't. I don't mean that ugly. I don't know all sorts of songs. I don't know most of them, really. This song is called "Into the Fire", a 2004 jam by an English band called Thirteen Senses. They're from Cornwall, actually, in southwest England. Cornwall is the Vancouver of England. That's not true. There is zero basis for my saying that. I apologize. At this point, it should be illegal for me to talk about England. We got a fine example of an emotionally manipulative piano ballad here. This song, "Into the Fire",
21:07 Speaker 02 the simple, insistent piano chords, the politely melodic electric guitar, the charmingly downbeat vocals, the palpable sense of both melancholy and grandeur. Grey's Anatomy did not make this song famous and did not make the Cornwall rock band Thirteen Senses famous. But that's not the show's fault, or the band's fault, or the song's fault.
21:35 Speaker 02 I could quit. But here's the thing.
21:41 Speaker 02 I love the playing field. Maybe it's the surgery's fault. You ever think of that? It's a relatively pedestrian surgery. A 15-year-old girl is having grand mal seizures. Nobody can figure out why. Her parents are super pissy about it. And eventually Meredith saves the day. Turns out the girl hit her head doing rhythm gymnastics and it caused an aneurysm. The surgery goes fine. It's not like there's a bomb in this lady, all right? I'm sorry that happened to you, miss. But this is not exactly gripping television. No George Clooney, no freeze ray, no falling helicopter. Because it's a numbers game, ultimately. There are seven emotionally manipulative pop songs in the Grey's Anatomy pilot.
22:26 Speaker 02 And the first one is by Riley O'Kylie and the other six ain't. And that's that. Not every song can get famous. There have been 448 episodes of Grey's Anatomy. You figure half a dozen emotionally manipulative pop songs per episode on average. And then, you know, do the math. Seriously, you do the math. I majored in journalism. This is a primo, throw a bunch of shit at the wall and see what sticks situation. There are only so many perfect emotionally manipulative TB episodes. There are only so many perfect emotionally manipulative pop songs. And it's rarer still for the perfect emotionally manipulative pop song
23:08 Speaker 02 and the perfect emotionally manipulative soap opera episode to align. It's pointless to sit around waiting for that to happen. And I could quit, but here's the thing.
23:22 Speaker 04 It was a beautiful afternoon to save lives, people.
23:26 Speaker 04 Let's have some fun.
23:34 Speaker 02 My name is Rob Harvilla. This is the 24th episode of 60 Songs That Explain the 90s: Cole and the 2000s. And this week, we are discussing "How to Save a Life" by The Fray from their 2005 debut album, also called "How to Save a Life." The Fray are from Denver, Colorado. And I know slightly more about Denver than I do about Cornwall, England. So this will be fun, probably. It's a beautiful day for an ad break, people. Let's have some fun.
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24:38 Speaker 02 I got this big emotional thing with songs with the line, "I want you to know." Has this ever come up? I dig songs where somebody sings, "I want you to know." Those words, that sentiment, exactly. Like this.
25:03 Speaker 02 Not like this, actually. That's Debaser by the Pixies, who broke up by a fax machine. The Pixies, Debaser, the whole Doolittle album from 89, that's some of the greatest music ever made by anybody ever, but you don't need me to tell you that. I used to play the whole Doolittle album on Rock Band, the video game. Like, I'm playing La La Love You on Rock Band, that was awesome. But no, that's not the sort of "I want you to know" I mean. Debaser, that is an awfully aggressive, disconcerting, ultra-violent sort of "I want you to know." Let's try again.
25:47 Speaker 02 No, sorry, but Alanis Morissette's 1995 blockbuster, "You Wanna Know," is arguably even more aggressive, disconcerting, and ultra-violent. Don't tell her I said that, though. Thank you. Okay, I mean a yearning, super melancholy, starved-for-human-connection sort of "I want you to know." When this phrase pops back into my head, which it does periodically, it's usually this guy singing it.
26:22 Speaker 02 Tom York moaning, "I want you to know," on Radiohead's Knives Out from 2001's Amnesiac, which is better than Kid A. I don't know if I really even believe that, but I just felt like saying it. Tom York here, "It's not quite the apex, I want you to know, but it's close." The vulnerability, but also, okay, yeah, the gnarly hostility in Tom York's voice, the volatility. I don't get a love song vibe off Knives Out, but I just love the directness, the insistence of this phrase. The subtext of every song ever is, "I want you to know." The subtext of anything anyone says to anyone is, "I
27:04 Speaker 02 want you to know." That's literally what talking is for. You want someone to know something, even if what you want them to know is like, "Look out!" So the act of stating that desire explicitly, spelling out that desire to be understood, I just sit up a little straighter and pay just a little bit more attention when anybody sings the words. Yes, even this guy.
27:40 Speaker 02 I forget what Steven Jenkins sings next on Third Eye Blind's Jumper from 1997. I'm sure it's super profound, whatever he says next. "Everyone has to face down the demons." That's what he says next. That's fine. That's true. That phrasing, Steven's phrasing, there's your yearning, your less hostile vulnerability. Just the way he sings the word "know." "I want you to know." When you really want someone to know, you give the word "know" two syllables. He gets it. He knows what "I want you to know" about "I want you to know." We're getting closer. Obligatory.
28:33 Speaker 02 Iris by the Goo Goo Dolls is so obviously Apex Mountain. I want you to know that it's almost cheating. I've half a mind to just take Iris off the board. Mr. Goo Goo Dolls, I know how to say his name, but I don't remember how to spell it. And I'd want to spell it right here, even if nobody else sees it. And I don't feel like looking up the spelling right now. Mr. Goo Goo Dolls really sings the bejesus out of the word want in I Just Want You To Know Who I Am. Tremendous breakthroughs in the art and science of singing the word want on Iris. Iris is way too powerful. Iris is like pointing a giant freeze ray at the sun. But yeah, dog, now we're bringing out the big guns.
29:29 Speaker 02 Hubastank. I just typed the word Hubastank and now I'm just staring at it. You ever do that? I'm just staring at Hubastank and trying to convince myself it's the name of a Russian farming village. And it's working. Hubastank. The Reason. 2003. Hubastank are basically Yassified Third Eye Blind. I don't know if I believe that either. Now we're talking. I just want you to know, right before you hit the giant bombastic, overwrought cigarette lighter app on your phone waving arena rock mega chorus. I found a reason to be. Hell,
30:08 Speaker 02 yes. Phenomenal. I found another really good one, but you maybe ain't gonna like it.
30:27 Speaker 04 Yeah.
30:28 Speaker 02 I regret to inform you that this is exactly what I'm talking about. Jet. Shine on. 2006. Sorry, Pitchfork, but this is an elite I want you to know. Soft spoken, humbled, strikingly out of character for Jet. We got a swaggering ass knucklehead retro rock band doing a full on emotionally manipulative piano ballad. I'm into it. Bonus points for being Australian for some reason. I'm extra enthralled when Australians want me to know something. There's a specific tone I look for in a truly exemplary I want you to know.
31:08 Speaker 02 Pathetic is not the word I want. Debased, that's closer and the Pixies echo helps, but not quite. The word might be thirsty in the colloquial derogatory too online sense, but that's glib and derogatory and too online. I want a fancier word than desperate, but maybe it's just desperate. I am desperate for you to know this. Okay, so Jets are rocketing up my I want you to know leaderboard. Jet have surpassed Radiohead, just in case you've never heard those four words in that order, but my all time number one is unsurpassable.
31:45 Speaker 04 Don't feel bad for me. I want you to know.
31:53 Speaker 02 The Smiths. Asleep. 1985. Nobody who has ever walked the earth or pathetically thirstily crawled the earth. Nobody is going to sing the words I want you to know like Morrissey. Relax, I don't want to talk about literally any other aspect of Morrissey, past, present or future. This is the one. This is the I want you to know to rule them all. Asleep by The Smiths. Morrissey sings the word no with one syllable, but with the sad sack gravitas of like 200 syllables and it is preceded by the line, "Don't feel bad for me." Of course he wants you to feel bad for him. This is my favorite Smith song, Asleep.
32:37 Speaker 02 I'm not enough of a super fan to know if that's an incendiary opinion or an eye rolling normie opinion, but I'll just assume that loving this song makes me sound super cool.
32:48 Speaker 04 Sing me to sleep. Sing me to sleep. I don't want to wake up.
33:00 Speaker 02 Morrissey, rest assured, would stay up with you all night if he knew how to save a life. I used to know how to play "Asleep" by The Smiths on the piano. That's not a flash, it's easy. And in college, I had a dismaying abundance of free time. So one afternoon in college, I walk into the cool campus coffee house, right? The one that had open mic nights where I'd regularly terrorize the populace with, for example, my version of Jeff Buckley's version of "Hallelujah," which sincerely remains one of my greatest regrets. But so this coffee house has a little stage and a piano. And I walk in and the joint's crowded like always. And I get a little narcissism spike or whatever. And I go up
33:41 Speaker 02 onto the empty stage and I sit down at the piano and I start playing "Asleep" by The Smiths in its entirety. Often, I would try to sing it also, but I didn't try to sing it this time. Give me that much credit. This is a crowded, raucous college coffee house, a lot of chatter, etc. And mercifully, the chatter does not die down one iota as I play a Smith song in its entirety on the piano. I am roundly, graciously ignored. But I finish the song and I walk off the stage and I'm walking past all the crowded tables. And there's a girl sitting at a table near the stage. And as I approach, I get the sense she's going to say something. She's going to say, hey, I know that song. Was that The
34:23 Speaker 02 Smiths? But I'm way too shy to actually talk to this girl. So I blow right by her and out the door and that's it. That's the end of the story. And what I dig about this story is how pathetically uneventful it is. It is only eventful in my great, big, empty collegiate head. Dollars to donuts, that girl did not actually recognize the song or intend to speak to me or pay any attention whatsoever to my antics. But I create this whole grand romantic tableau in my head, right? Just so I can screw it up. That is the essence of The Smiths to me. That is the essence of "I Want You to Know" to me. That is the essence of an emotionally manipulative piano ballad to me.
35:07 Speaker 02 The thirsty, overwrought yearning for connection conveyed in the plainest language possible, as plaintively as possible, but ideally self sabotaged somehow. Don't feel bad for me and forgive the expression, but here in the early 2000s, if emotionally manipulative piano ballads and/or I want you to know energy is your thing, then my friends, we are eating.
35:50 Speaker 02 I will never say that again, what I just said. I mean it. Shiver, a song by Coldplay. Coldplay, a rock band from England. For legal reasons, I cannot elaborate on that description of Coldplay. The first Coldplay album called Parachutes is released in July 2000 and it's hyperbolic, but not like criminally hyperbolic to say that everything changes. The fundamental 21st century rock band template is etched in granite by Coldplay immediately. Anthemic soft rock is hot shit thereafter.
36:32 Speaker 02 Coldplay blow up with Yellow, one of the most bonkers, popular breakthrough debut singles in rock and roll history. And that statement is both hyperbolic and not quite accurate because in England, Yellow is not Coldplay's first single. Shiver is. The I want you to know song. Mr. Coldplay's delicate falsetto, Chris Martin, that's Mr. Coldplay's name, I can spell that. Mr. Coldplay's delicate falsetto conveys both profound thirstiness and nice guy type deception, which means this dude's going to excel big time at emotionally manipulative piano ballads as well. This one's called Trouble and this dude is it.
37:29 Speaker 02 Oh, yes, he did. If a mellow sounding dude is playing piano and singing you a song that goes, "Oh, baby, I never meant it," yes, he did. He totally meant to. You'll forgive him, though. You can fix him. Not only does Chris Martin excel in this mode, but his powers only intensify over time.
38:02 Speaker 02 "The Scientist," from Coldplay's second album, released in 2002 and called "A Rush of Blood to the Head." Chris Martin's falsetto is functionally a world-threatening freeze ray at this point, a description that I intend to be complimentary. I would say that "The Scientist" is Coldplay's peak emotionally manipulative piano ballad, but that would be egregiously inaccurate, now wouldn't it?
38:51 Speaker 02 "Fix You," from Coldplay's third album, released in 2005 and called "X and Y." X ampersand Y, this is the one. "Fix You." You can't fix him, but he can fix you. This song has a truly awe-inspiring and terrifying power, both as a standalone song and as a visual media bonding agent. If you watch literally anything soundtrack by Coldplay's "Fix You," you will burst into tears. I am neither making that up nor exaggerating. I was gonna play you a clip from the newsroom, that early 2010s HBO show about TV journalists, that show everyone hated when they used Coldplay's "Fix You."
39:33 Speaker 02 To soundtrack a bunch of annoying people yelling into their telephones as they're reporting about the Gabby Giffords shooting, but I decided that would confuse half of you and needlessly antagonize the other half. So forget it. So instead, my buddy Garrett was at a mid 2000s Oakland A's game. He was a huge A's fan back when the A's were still in Oakland and Major League Baseball sucked a whole lot less. My buddy Garrett was at an A's game and they played a season highlight reel set to fix you that peaked with a Frank Thomas homerun right about here.
40:19 Speaker 02 Probably Frank Thomas hit the homerun just a little before this, right when the drums kicked in, but you get me. Not a dry eye in Oakland Coliseum, folks. When they replayed a Frank Thomas homerun with fix you blaring in the background. I did not witness this in person. It just feels like I did. Garrett graciously described this moment to me in great detail later. And my theory is that this song's awe inspiring and terrifying power all comes down to one chord. One chord change in this song somehow releases all the dopamine in your body in a split second. Here it comes.
41:13 Speaker 02 That chord boom to street. That is a monster chord change, dude. This part of fix you, the drums and electric guitar.
41:27 Speaker 02 The chords go C, F, C, G, the first time around, but then right here it goes A minor, F, C, G, and that A minor, dude. I'm telling you,
41:41 Speaker 02 it's either an A minor or an A minor seventh. Dude, this is important. The very greatest, the highest echelon, the Mount Rushmore emotionally manipulative piano ballads all have some singular turbocharging moment. Let It Be by The Beatles has George Harrison's guitar solo. Along December by Counting Crows has the guitar solo, or the accordion, or the line, all at once you look across a crowded room and see the way the light attaches to a girl, or all of the above. Transatlanticism by Death Cab for Cutie. They somehow managed to delay the turbocharging moment until the seven minute mark of a not quite eight minute song.
42:26 Speaker 02 But Transatlanticism by Death Cab for Cutie has the words, "So come on," right here.
42:44 Speaker 02 Unbelievable. You want majestic, debased yearning? Transatlanticism is your jam. Put it on repeat and you can listen to that song seven and a half times an hour. The exact delivery system changes from song to song and band to band. But with truly great emotionally manipulative piano ballads, there is always one pristine cataclysmic moment where everything, "Oh my God, Rob, shut up and start talking about the Fray already."
43:28 Speaker 02 The Frayer are a piano-based rock band from Denver, Colorado.
43:33 Speaker 02 Excuse me. That was a rare glimpse into my internal editorial process just now. I get distracted by literally anything. This song is called "All at Once," and Mr. Frey just really sang the bejesus out of the word "crowd" there, did he not? That is a peak Adam Duritz word delivery. The Frey, both in my personal opinion and in the Frey's opinion, based on many of their interviews, the Frey's two biggest musical influences are Coldplay and Counting Crows. And I figure I could either play you a bunch of Counting Crows songs to solidify that argument, or I could just play you the Counting Crows-est song on the Frey's first record.
44:27 Speaker 02 The tempo change there is a nice melodramatic, but not too melodramatic, touch. The foundational Frey sound, the tentatively bright melodies, the driving but downbeat piano, the modest but sturdy Americana harmonies, this is me in rock critic mode, all that led me to assume that all the Frey's songs are about light attaching to girls you see across crowded rooms, but it turns out I was being presumptuous. And not for the last time. Denver, Colorado, city of mountains. The dudes in the Frey all met in Denver in grade school or junior high or high school, depending on which two dudes you're talking about specifically.
45:07 Speaker 02 On their 2005 debut album called "How to Save a Life," the Frey consist of Isaac Slade on lead vocals and piano, Dave Welsh on lead guitar, Joe King on rhythm guitar and some vocals, Ben Weisaki on drums, and a couple different dudes on bass on the first album, but like eight different bassists total over the next 20 years between records and touring. The Frey are like Spinal Tap, but the bassist keeps exploding, apparently. I respect it. The Frey got crazy huge immediately, at least from the perspective of anybody not Living in Denver. No band anywhere ever is an overnight success in any remotely literal or even figurative way.
45:51 Speaker 02 But these guys played exactly one show outside the state of Colorado before they got a major label record deal. In 2012, upon the release of their third album, Scars and Stories, talking to ColoradoMusicBuzz.com, frontman Isaac Slade says, quote, "In a way, our career has gone backwards. You're supposed to do two or three records when nobody's looking so you can go through your awkward phase out of the spotlight. I feel like we got huge in junior high," end quote. And the ColoradoMusicBuzz.com part is important there, I think. The Fray are proud local heroes initially praised to the skies by proud local media.
46:33 Speaker 02 When I lived in Oakland in the early 2000s, I was music editor at an alt weekly called The East Bay Express. And one of my buddies in our poorly regarded national chain of alt weeklies, I really gravitated toward this rad dude named Dave Herrera, who was music editor at a Denver alt weekly called Westward. And I was talking to Dave once and I was like, what's up in Denver, man? And I remember so clearly Dave was immediately like, "The Fray, The Fray, The Fray, they're gonna be huge." And I really truly dug Dave a lot, but internally, I'm guessing I had kind of an I love that for you type reaction, right? I probably thought, is it even legal for Denver to have a huge band? And Dave was right and I was wrong. That was presumptuous of me. Coastal elites.
47:18 Speaker 02 Coastal elites are the worst, especially when you personally start acting like one.
47:36 Speaker 02 Yes, this song is called Vienna. It's a moody and extremely effective waltz. It's impressively the third best pop song called Vienna after Ultravox and Billy Joel. It's on the first Fray album and it's single-handedly got Epic Records A&R man Mike Flynn to personally fly out to Denver. Talking to rad Denver music journalist Dave Herrera for a piece in the Denver Alt. Weekly Westward, Mike says, quote, "The only song that I heard was Vienna. I was just really compelled by Isaac's voice and the lyrical content. It just sounded real to me. It was real music. It was timeless music.
48:19 Speaker 02 All I know is when I heard it, I got on an airplane and went there. I didn't care where it came from." End quote. Well, Mike, if you dug the third best ever song called Vienna, then get a load of definitely the best ever song called "Over My Head (Cable Car)"
48:47 Speaker 02 Yeah, Mike, the A&R guy quickly brings the Fray out to New York City for a private showcase that doubles as the band's first ever show in not Colorado. The Fray signed to Epic and suddenly overnight, "Over My Head (Cable Car)" goes from a cool Denver radio hit to a massive national top 10 pop hit. Why is that, do you suppose? What is it about this song? This song that is crucially the Fray's first big hit? Do you agree with the label guy? Is "Over My Head" real? Is it real music? Is it timeless? I don't know about all that, but I will say I really dig the way this guy sings the word "wish" and rhymes the words "rearrange," "stranger," "change," and "disengage."
49:46 Speaker 02 During this song's lengthy, commercial peak, I never quite figured out what "over my head parentheses cable car" was about, and that kept me listening to it hard, each of the hundreds of times I heard it on the radio. There's something so sharp and crisp and compelling to me about Isaac Slade's diction here. The benevolent snarl of his vowels. "I wish you were a stranger..." It's about his brother. Isaac's brother, Caleb. "I wish you were a stranger, I could disengage." Isaac and his brother had a big fight, but it's chill now. And listen, I love overwrought, sad-sacked piano ballads about light attaching
50:26 Speaker 02 to girls. Girls you want to try to fix. Girls you want to try to fix you. Girls you wish felt sorry for you. But I dig a top 10 piano rock and pop song about a dude's fight with his brother. I dig a little variety. I also dig the raucous, super-low piano bonging right here. That's a technical term. Piano bonging.
51:01 Speaker 02 Maybe I'm overthinking it. Maybe this song's just got a monster hook, and the American Coldplay is a pretty shrewd lane to occupy in 2005. But I do get the sense consistently with the Fray that they are singing about something, and singing about different stuff, and they mean it. And you can just tell when a band means it. You know? "I want you to know. I really, really, really want you to know." It feels not coincidental to me that the Fray are a Christian band, meaning a band composed of devout Christians, not a band making quote-unquote "Christian rock," as sneakily great and anthemic as lots of straight-up Christian rock can be. Casting crowns, they're a dope-
51:45 Speaker 02 Christian rock band. My mom really digs Casting Crowns. Do you think if I play a Casting Crowns song, my mom will forgive me for saying phantom dick 500 times in the Mr. Brightside episode? Let's find out. Here's a 2005 Casting Crowns song called Praise You In This Storm with, I think we can agree, some Fray-type melodic energy.
52:21 Speaker 02 But the Fray, respectfully, find Christian rock's purview a little too constrictive, lyrically and thematically. Talking to Denver's Westward, Isaac Slade says, quote, "My problem with Christian music is a lot of it is too happy. It's too smiley. It's like you know from the get-go that it's not completely honest because they never say they're sad. It's like we're not allowed to talk about anything else. I mean, we all have opinions. I have opinions about morality and about culture and that stuff, but I think the sheer nature of art is kind of take it or leave it. If you pound people over the head, they
53:01 Speaker 02 get suspicious. They don't trust you, and it's not art. It's propaganda. And we're not about Jesus propaganda." End quote. But I do think this super thoughtful Christian perspective, the unabashed earnestness, the urgency, the palpable desire to be understood, that all works tremendously to the Fray's advantage. These guys genuinely sound like they want to save your life but don't know how.
53:42 Speaker 02 And this song too, I heard hundreds of times on the radio, but I kept listening hard because I just assumed that How to Save a Life was about a breakup or whatever, and I just couldn't quite make all the pieces fit. "We need to talk" is breakup language, see? But it's also intervention language. This is a song Slade wrote after working at a camp in Denver for troubled teenagers. Talking to USA Today in 2006, Slade says, quote, "One of the kids I was paired up with was a musician. Here I was, a protected suburbanite, and he was just 17 and had all these problems, and no one could write a manual on how to save him." End quote.
54:23 Speaker 02 What drives this song is the uncertainty, the flailing, the unsmiliness, the failure to reach this kid. The sarcasm of "after all, you do know best" is really doing it for me here.
54:53 Speaker 02 "You try to slip past his defense without granting innocence." There's just a satisfying click to this dude's rhyming words. It's a tremendously confident way to convey a total lack of confidence. God is here by name on How to Save a Life, but God is a last resort. The fray evoke God not to underscore God's power, but to underscore their own powerlessness.
55:35 Speaker 02 That little piano riff right there. Do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do. Sometimes I find that riff to be a little too simplistic, a little piano recitally. And other times, the sweetness, the gentleness, the protected suburbanite guilelessness of it really clicks into place for me. As for the chorus, for whatever reason, it just harmonizes beautifully with especially emo hospital-based soap operas.
56:19 Speaker 02 So that's a scene from Scrubs. That's from a 2006 fifth season episode of the Zach Braff starring broad comedy and heavy tragedy hospital drama Scrubs. That was Dr. Cox just now bugging out because his third straight patient died after a series of organ transplants, where it turns out the donor was infected with rabies. Specifically, the Scrubs episode aired in April 2006, which is too bad for Scrubs, because this episode of Grey's Anatomy aired in March.
56:50 Speaker 06 Nikki, your boyfriend called. He said he doesn't want you to die. Kevin called. Yes, will you let us operate?
57:01 Speaker 06 Nikki?
57:05 Speaker 02 Nikki didn't make it. I'm sorry you're finding out like this. She was up in a tree spying on her ex-boyfriend when it got struck by lightning and she fell out and ruptured her spleen. Izzy's sorta boyfriend, Denny, had surgery too during this song, and he made it, but I wouldn't get too attached to Denny either. Grey's Anatomy, with this pretty famous season two episode, will colonize this song? Kinda? Flash forward to season three and "How to Save a Life" is the Grey's Anatomy promo song. Flash forward to season seven, and there's a whole musical episode where the doctors, meaning the actors playing the doctors, they sing during their surgeries. And I find the context for all of this terribly confusing. But anyway, this happens.
57:57 Speaker 02 I don't have time to figure out what the hell is going on here. I wish you well. I'm sorry. Flash forward to season 11 and there's a whole extra cataclysmic Grey's Anatomy episode called "How to Save a Life." Yeah. So after that big season two episode, the phrase "How to Save a Life" hits number three on the Billboard Hot 100. There is a substantial Grey's Anatomy bump, but it comes at a price. This song is now often publicly regarded as the Grey's Anatomy song. And songwriters generally do not want this, or they don't want all of this. They want the huge visibility and commercial success. Yes, okay, but not the Lifetime Association.
58:37 Speaker 02 Christopher Cross was not too psyched about General Hospital hijacking "Think of Laura." Death Cab for Cutie were pretty freaked out when the OC, a very popular mid 2000s TV melodrama not set in a hospital, the OC functionally tried to make Death Cab for Cutie its houseband, and the Death Cab guys were conflicted. As for Grey's Anatomy trying to make the Fray its houseband, frontman Isaac Slade, interviewed by the Syracuse Post-Standard in 2010, says, quote, "It's been a blessing and maybe a loud affiliation at the worst," end quote. That's diplomatic. That's more of a Christian rock answer than a rock and roll answer, appropriately enough.
59:21 Speaker 02 Oh, oh, oh, I almost forgot. Remember how the very greatest Mount Rushmore emotionally manipulative piano ballads all have some singular turbocharging moment that makes them truly great? With "How to Save a Life," it's right near the end, too. It's the "Where Did I Go Wrong" harmony right here.
59:49 Speaker 02 Best part of the song, those backing vocals right there. Almost forgot that. Sorry. The Fray have made four albums total and they're still touring, although Isaac Slade himself is no longer in the band, as he announced on Instagram in 2022. The rhythm guitarist, Joe King, he sings everything now. In 2024, Isaac gave a tremendously raw keynote address at the Modern Band Summit in Colorado, where he talked about dealing with anxiety and panic attacks and loneliness, et cetera. It is an awfully heavy and defiantly vulnerable speech, and it is reflective of a guy who has always written and sung beautifully about wishing he knew exactly what to do, but he doesn't.
1:00:32 Speaker 02 "How to Save a Life" is a painfully real song that has soundtracked some fascinating, but decidedly fictional, medical drama. It takes an extra powerful song to lend gravitas to all these emotionally manipulative TV surgeries, but not betray the band's actual emotional core. A disconcerting number of hospital patients have died on screen while this song was playing, but the Fray, to their infinite credit, pulled through.
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1:02:07 Speaker 02 Our guest today is your friend and mine, Yasi Salek, host of Vansplain, international icon. She got a rad haircut recently. She's about to go to Europe. Every time I try and talk to her, she's shopping at Home Goods. Welcome, Yasi. Did I miss anything in terms of?
1:02:23 Speaker 06 No, that's pretty much my whole life update personality all rolled into one. Thank you so much for the gorgeous welcome.
1:02:29 Speaker 02 That's a lot going on. I should have asked you this beforehand, but Yasi, are you a fan of the Denver, Colorado rock band? The Fray?
1:02:38 Speaker 06 It's a complicated question.
1:02:42 Speaker 06 If the man was standing next to me right now in my home, would I recognize him? The answer is no.
1:02:49 Speaker 02 Isaac Slade, the former frontman of The Fray, yes.
1:02:53 Speaker 06 What? Former? They have a new singer? They went fuel mode? We'll get into fuel later.
1:02:58 Speaker 02 They went fuel mode, but it's the old guitar player who used to sing a couple of songs and now sings the whole, all the songs because Isaac, I just decided he didn't want to do it anymore. I don't think they pushed him out.
1:03:10 Speaker 06 So now if I go see The Fray, that other man is going to sing the two bangers that I love, three that you informed me of, the third one?
1:03:18 Speaker 02 Yes.
1:03:19 Speaker 06 I don't like that. The answer is I love those two songs. I don't know one single big Newton past. I didn't know they were from Denver, Colorado. I don't know anything about them and that's how I like it. That's how I like our relationship to be, me and The Fray.
1:03:34 Speaker 02 All right. Okay. Just, there's a sense of mystery to your relationship with The Fray, including who might be singing for them at this moment. Okay. What is it? I, I assume by those two songs, you are referring to How to Save a Life and Cable Car? Over my head, is that correct?
1:03:50 Speaker 06 Correct. Two goddamn gorgeous.
1:03:54 Speaker 02 Okay. What is it about these songs? That speaks to you.
1:03:58 Speaker 06 They just are really exemplary of that, like, early to mid 2000s grocery store slash emotional moment in a television series core that really hits my heart and soul. There's a production value that's so specific to these songs. They just get you in the, they get you in the feelings. And it's a great song, just like it has like a propulsive emotion. Do you feel that? You know, it's like really building to something and then you get to let go and be like, I'm in over my head, I'm over my, everyone knows, like that, you know?
1:04:39 Speaker 02 Exactly like that. There's a catharsis.
1:04:41 Speaker 06 Correct.
1:04:42 Speaker 02 To the fray, yes. What do you think that is? What is that production value? You know, what is that songwriting technique? What is it about them that generates that propulsion that allows for that catharsis? What's the deal here, really?
1:04:56 Speaker 06 Much like what they look like and all of their thoughts and feelings. That's between them and God and I don't need to know the secrets. I just need to know how it feels for me personally.
1:05:06 Speaker 02 All right. Did you come to them through Grey's Anatomy or were you previously into them? That seems important.
1:05:15 Speaker 06 Absolutely, babe. Was it the episode in season two called Superstition? Where Denny is fucking hanging on by a thread. Izzy has to admit, you know, spoiler alert, not for long.
1:05:28 Speaker 02 Not for long.
1:05:29 Speaker 06 Yeah, that's really exactly where I found that song.
1:05:33 Speaker 02 Were you watching Grey's Anatomy from the beginning? Are you a day one or early adopter Grey's Anatomy person?
1:05:38 Speaker 06 Yeah, I'm still watching Grey's Anatomy in this year of our Lord 2025.
1:05:43 Speaker 02 Okay, so what is it about this show, first of all? Because my wife was a day one as well. And she told me like they used to gather in her college, like common areas to watch it, you know, every Thursday, right? Like it's clear that from the beginning, this was a huge phenomenon. This show specifically, what sets Grey's Anatomy apart from your average hospital melodrama situation?
1:06:06 Speaker 06 I don't even know how to answer that. It's just phenomenal characters, absolutely bananas, insane plotlines.
1:06:15 Speaker 02 Yes.
1:06:16 Speaker 06 Um, jumping the shark left and right.
1:06:18 Speaker 02 That's right. Just sharks diving.
1:06:21 Speaker 06 Intrigued. Hot men, McDreamys, McSteamys, um, Dr. Christina Yang, one of the best TV characters ever to exist.
1:06:31 Speaker 02 I agree.
1:06:32 Speaker 06 The first like four seasons of Grey's Anatomy are like peak television. Has it rapidly declined since then? Yes. Is it almost unidentifiable to the first seasons now? Do I even know anyone on the show past three people? No, but I will keep watching. Um, till the wheels come off of this show, I'll be watching.
1:06:53 Speaker 02 Absolutely. I mean, America has declined and is nearly unrecognizable now compared to what it was. And so, so yeah, it's, it's, it's in good company there if it really has gone downhill. So I, I do think that How to Save a Life, cause it was in a Scrubs episode right around this time. I do think that you mentioned.
1:07:10 Speaker 06 Doesn't it feel that should be illegal? Like, don't you think there should be some summit between the music supervisors of Scrubs and Grey's Anatomy where they like divvy up the songs? It's very confusing.
1:07:20 Speaker 02 Music supervisor jail should be a, a.
1:07:23 Speaker 06 Yeah.
1:07:23 Speaker 02 It's so close. It's like a month apart, which I had forgotten about. It's close enough that it, it is plausible to likely that they were unaware of each other using it. And the Scrubs people just sort of missed out by a month. Like it just.
1:07:36 Speaker 06 Totally.
1:07:37 Speaker 02 Be like that sometimes, rather than Scrubs, like deliberately trying to draft off this song's use in Grey's Anatomy.
1:07:44 Speaker 06 Sure, but that evil music licenser was just smirking the whole time, being like, yeah, you can have it. No, yeah, I think it'd be great on Scrubs.
1:07:53 Speaker 02 I like getting paid again. What is it about this song then, How to Save a Life? Why? Cause like there's seven or eight or nine, you know, manipulative pop songs in every episode of this show that is always bananas, is always manipulative. Like, why did this song, How to Save a Life, how did this become, you know, the ultimate to the point where it's like the theme song for the promos? To the point where they're naming episodes after it, to the point where there's an episode where they sing it.
1:08:19 Speaker 06 Yeah, it's a good one.
1:08:20 Speaker 02 Later in the declining years, like, why did this song specifically become the Grey's Anatomy anthem?
1:08:27 Speaker 06 I wish I could say that there's some like magical ingredient or like secret. Beauty of the song, I mean, I'm sure there is. I literally think it just boils down to the fact that the lyrics are how to save a life.
1:08:40 Speaker 06 Do you know, and it's a show about saving lives.
1:08:42 Speaker 02 You're right. There's something pleasingly literal about it.
1:08:45 Speaker 06 And Dr. McDreamy would use to say, it's a beautiful day to save lives. You know, it just really works so well.
1:08:50 Speaker 02 There you go.
1:08:50 Speaker 06 Synergistically. Rob, can I tell you a really quick, embarrassing story?
1:08:54 Speaker 02 Absolutely.
1:08:54 Speaker 06 Related to Grey's Anatomy.
1:08:56 Speaker 02 Yes.
1:08:56 Speaker 06 Many years ago, I was at a party at the Chateau Marmont here in Los Angeles, California. And, you know, I had had a few drinks and I was introduced to this man, very handsome man. And I was like, oh my God, I, we know each other. Oh my God, where do we know each other from? And God bless this kind man was like, no, yeah, totally. You look familiar too. But I like, wouldn't let it go, like so annoying. Like it's killing me. Like where is it? I don't know. The gym, whatever. We never got down to the bottom of it. And this man, because he's kind and benevolent, never said what he should have said, which I realized at three in the morning when I woke up, sat up in my bed and said, no, that was Dr. Jackson Avery
1:09:38 Speaker 06 from the television program Grey's Anatomy. You don't know him. He is your TV friend from the television.
1:09:44 Speaker 02 It was more of a parasocial thing. I thought you were going to tell me it was Isaac Slade from the Fray and you did not recognize him, even that.
1:09:50 Speaker 06 That wouldn't have come up. I would have been like, hello, nice to meet you. Anyway, sorry. I've interrupted the flow of.
1:09:56 Speaker 02 Oh no, that you having, you embarrassing yourself at a party at the Chateau Marmont is exactly the flow that we desire to create here.
1:10:03 Speaker 06 In front of Dr. Jackson Avery of Grey's Anatomy.
1:10:06 Speaker 02 That's right. I had never thought of like Counting Crows as secretly one of the most influential 90s bands on rock music going forward. But like, I think about, you know, Coldplay obviously are huge at this time, like the Fray, Keen, like we had like a huge run of exactly this sort of thing, like propulsive, cathartic, piano-driven, ultra emotional, soft rock. Like looking back, you know, is there an argument that A Long December is as culturally impactful as Smells Like Teen Spirit? That's what I'm really asking.
1:10:37 Speaker 06 Now I understand why you chose Long December because you're going for piano-driven music.
1:10:42 Speaker 02 Exactly.
1:10:43 Speaker 06 I see. I was simply going off vibes.
1:10:46 Speaker 02 Well, that too, but the piano, I think, I think is key there.
1:10:49 Speaker 06 Yeah. I mean, I think like just broadly speaking, um, and we've talked about it before on various other podcasts. The fatigue of grunge had set in pretty heavy and people wanted a little hope, babe. A little, you know, a little light up the, light up the heart and
1:11:08 Speaker 02 A little saving of lives.
1:11:09 Speaker 06 Little saving of lives. And I just don't want you to count out a little band who put out a gorgeous song in the year 2000 called Hanging By A Moment.
1:11:21 Speaker 02 Hmm.
1:11:21 Speaker 06 And I am speaking, of course, of Lifehouse. That's not a piano driven song, but it's, I do feel that also set the table for the fray. You know, they walked so the fray could run, if you will.
1:11:32 Speaker 02 Totally, totally. Cause I think people like to remember the early 2000s, like, oh, the Strokes, the White Stripes. Like, no, it was Nickelback, Hanging By A Moment, Coldplay and the Fray.
1:11:42 Speaker 06 No, it was desperate for change, starving for truth, closer to where I started chasing after you.
1:11:51 Speaker 02 It's a great intro.
1:11:53 Speaker 06 Have you heard the Slow Pulp cover? That song fucking rips anyways.
1:11:56 Speaker 02 Whoa, I love Slow Pulp too.
1:11:58 Speaker 06 Yeah, and they clearly have exquisite taste, much like myself, because they covered Hanging By A Moment.
1:12:02 Speaker 02 That band has just modeled themselves after you in every respect. I could always tell. I knew, I knew that's why I liked them. Are you a Ben Folds person? Because I feel like the more sentimental end of Ben Folds, both Ben Folds Five, like Brick, obviously, but even like his solo stuff, like the really sappy sentimental solo Ben Fold stuff, I feel is under appreciated as like an impetus for all of this we're discussing.
1:12:28 Speaker 06 It was my instinct to lie to you here. So I sounded more worldly and music knowledgeable because of my job. But the cold, hard truth is I simply only know the abortion song and I've never heard anything else by Ben Folds. I've seen his work on television as cameo as himself, big fan. But I only know the, only know the Christmas abortion song.
1:12:52 Speaker 02 Yes, as it is known. That is it. It's official title. And yeah, okay. Very well then. I will say that I think there's some Ben Folds happening with the Fray as well. And I mean
1:13:01 Speaker 06 I'm proud of myself for not lying here.
1:13:05 Speaker 02 I didn't know, I mean, you don't know anything about them. So it's fine. I didn't know immediately that the Frey were Christians, like they're not making Christian rock, obviously, but they are devout Christians, you know, who talk a lot about why they don't make Christian rock, just because they don't want to make propaganda, but it's part of what they do. Like, there's a lot of U2 in this band to me, both sonically and in the sense that they're like spiritual in like a serious way and right on sort of the edge of being actual Christian rock. You get that vibe, I guess, from these, from these two to three songs?
1:13:37 Speaker 06 A hundred. I mean, this is the most Christian band. U2 is high praise. And I think maybe if, again, this is Lifehouse also, these bands are Christian, even though they all do the same thing, where they're like, we're not a Christian band, we all are Christian and do go to church and we're going to talk about God in the songs, which I love. Jars of Clay, babe, we could go, this is such a rich genre.
1:13:58 Speaker 02 It really is. Sixpence None the Richer, you could throw them in there if you wanted, yeah.
1:14:02 Speaker 06 These bands are probably like U2, except that they unfortunately, like myself, were born too late and thus like weren't a punk band that then developed into like a beautiful, they were like, maybe like a third wave emo core that developed into this music. So they just had a lightly different genre trajectory.
1:14:26 Speaker 02 Is How to Save the Life better than Iris by the Goo Goo Dolls, another famous sad hospital song? No?
1:14:32 Speaker 06 Okay, first of all, first of all, Rob, first of fucking all, Iris is not a sad hospital song. Iris is a sad angel named Seth who comes to the earth, falls in love with a human woman, who I guess technically is a surgeon. Yes, because she's a surgeon, but really it's about him falling from the heavens and giving up his angelness to become a human for love. So I guess tangentially, it's a hospital song.
1:14:59 Speaker 02 She doesn't work at the post office. You know what I'm saying? I feel like the hospital was a crucial element.
1:15:03 Speaker 06 Okay, all right.
1:15:06 Speaker 06 I guess it's fine.
1:15:08 Speaker 02 Agree to disagree, disagree to disagree, I guess. When you were watching Grey's Anatomy, did you get into songs through Grey's Anatomy other than this one? Did you use like any of these shows like the OC people talk about a lot, even Scrubs to an extent? Like, did you use these shows for music discovery as such?
1:15:26 Speaker 06 No, and I don't know if you really, I think I was too old. So like, any music that came to me from these shows was like largely against my will, like the Snow Patrol song, you know, with love and respect for Snow Patrol, they're not a bad band, it's not a bad song, but it's like, I would never have known that song. And now I know it like in my bones. I know it like it was like the ancestral hymn of my people, you know, but it's like, why? It might have been. My mom actually loves it. She puts it on in the house quite a bit.
1:15:53 Speaker 02 Of course.
1:15:53 Speaker 06 But no, I was more of a movie, 90s movie soundtracks discovery person. By this time I was largely checked out. It's why the fray made no impact on me. I don't even know. The only reason it made it into my psyche was because of Grey's Anatomy, because I was full, pretty much ignoring contemporary music in 2004 and five.
1:16:12 Speaker 02 Nonetheless, you did say to me, you did say to me, and I think it's important to discuss, is Cable Car better than How to Save a Life in your opinion?
1:16:20 Speaker 06 I like kind of think it's like 10% better.
1:16:23 Speaker 02 10%? I would give you 10%. It's within the margin of error, 10% in either direction. Yeah, the verses are really good of Cable Car.
1:16:36 Speaker 02 There it is.
1:16:37 Speaker 06 I'm doing a dance. This is an audio.
1:16:39 Speaker 02 We can hear it. They can tell you're doing a dance.
1:16:41 Speaker 06 That part where he goes, I'm in over my, I'm in over my, you know, uh, inject it directly into my fucking veins. I literally scared a neighbor this morning because I was walking my dog and prepping for this and just singing full volume with my headphones in.
1:16:57 Speaker 02 Do you do that often? Do you sing while walking your dog, whatever?
1:17:00 Speaker 06 No, I'm usually listening to cursed podcasts, so.
1:17:04 Speaker 02 Yeah, just listening to Joe Rogan and yeah.
1:17:06 Speaker 06 Yeah, I'm just usually listening to Joe Rogan. I'm usually listening to some sort of manosphere podcast to keep my finger on the pulse.
1:17:15 Speaker 06 Of what's happening with men.
1:17:17 Speaker 02 Right. You mentioned like them trying to get you into music. Like I thought about Garden State a lot, right? And just like the difference between Grey's Anatomy, like playing How to Save a Life at this really emotionally heightened moment and Garden State being like you there, sitting there, you're into the shins, starting right now. Like the shins will save your life is the the archetypal, like most explicit. Like, and now we're going to sell five copies of the beta band moment in a movie from this era, right? Like, were you skeptical? Were you resistant almost when a TV show or a movie like tried that hard to get you into one song?
1:17:54 Speaker 06 I kind of feel like with this one, though, Grey's Anatomy, just like that beautiful, wonderful, talented music supervisor. I feel like she was just throwing stuff at the wall. And what actually happened was very organic, which is that everyone was like, what the fuck is this amazing shit? And then the response was just so wonderful that it, you know, it became, it moved from being nameless, faceless. Well, maybe at least nameless, stayed largely faceless.
1:18:23 Speaker 06 And became, you know, a phenomenon, whereas the shins were like a cool indie band and a cool indie movie. You know, a little bit different. There was no context around. When you heard that Fray song in the Grey's Anatomy, again, you were like, I don't know. Right. This is, I don't know where this came from.
1:18:38 Speaker 02 And I think that's important, too. Like the Fray are not critically derided the way like Nickelback or Jet or somebody are, but like they.
1:18:46 Speaker 06 Just full ignoring ours.
1:18:48 Speaker 02 Full ignoring.
1:18:49 Speaker 06 That does not exist to me. The Fray and critics have never met.
1:18:53 Speaker 02 Does that make them cooler almost? You know, that the Fray like appear to be, you know, leading some sort of shadow economy compared with whatever the critics are trying to get you into at any one time?
1:19:05 Speaker 06 I think it is kind of cool in in the anti-cool way. Did you know that Cablecar Over My Head is about his brother?
1:19:13 Speaker 02 I didn't until very recently.
1:19:15 Speaker 06 Do you write in the monologue? Okay, sorry, I don't like to, I didn't know anything about them till very, you literally yesterday, as you drew my attention to doing a slight bit of Wikipedia reading.
1:19:25 Speaker 02 Sure. I mean, a month ago, I would have told you that both of these songs are about like breakups, right? Or whatever. And like neither of them are, right?
1:19:32 Speaker 06 No.
1:19:32 Speaker 02 And I, I think that's cool.
1:19:33 Speaker 06 How dare you? Yeah, it is cool.
1:19:35 Speaker 02 Right. Like How to Save a Life being like pretty explicitly about being mad that you can't actually save a person's life. Like, that's all to the benefit of the song and the song's mystique, I think.
1:19:47 Speaker 06 They're both beautiful songs and Isaac Slade seems like a wonderful person and I hope he's thriving and I hope he's very rich.
1:19:54 Speaker 02 He's certainly rich, you know, I, rich, definitely thriving, probably, I think we can say.
1:19:59 Speaker 06 Man over my head, I'm over my.
1:20:05 Speaker 06 Thank you for that.
1:20:06 Speaker 02 You mentioned Snow Patrol, who I do think of these two bands in tandem, right? And it's partly Grey's Anatomy and it's partly, again, that sort of intangible, propulsive, cathartic quality that they have. Like Chasing Cars is the big one as far as Snow Patrol and TV Sinks or whatever, but like Run, like the super Coldplay power ballad, that's still my favorite Snow Patrol song. Like, is there, is there something about, have you gotten deeper into that band? Or is it the same sort of thing where you're into the hits as they were presented to you?
1:20:36 Speaker 06 You know that if you search the fray on Spotify, it returns four songs as the first half four songs. And the fourth one is Chasing Cars by Snow Patrol, which is actually incredible.
1:20:49 Speaker 02 There you go.
1:20:50 Speaker 06 That's the power of Grey's Anatomy.
1:20:52 Speaker 02 Are you still, are you watching that show in real time or do you just?
1:20:55 Speaker 06 I'm, I'm for once in my life behind. I was like fully caught up present moment until a little thing happened where my house burned down.
1:21:04 Speaker 02 Sure, that's gonna mess up your TV watching.
1:21:07 Speaker 06 Well, sure, because I had to get on my parents' TV watching schedule and they don't like hospital shows.
1:21:11 Speaker 02 No.
1:21:12 Speaker 06 So now I'm gonna, I'm, I have a whole season to catch up on and I can't wait.
1:21:17 Speaker 02 Okay.
1:21:17 Speaker 06 Speaking of something that you did for me with your, with your pre-questions, you pointed to another fray song.
1:21:24 Speaker 02 Yes.
1:21:25 Speaker 06 You found me and you were like, I love this song.
1:21:28 Speaker 02 It was another, yeah. What'd you think of it?
1:21:30 Speaker 06 Well, I was like, I don't know what that is. And so then I went and listened and then I was like, oh, yes, I do know what that is. I just had zero idea that it was by The Fray.
1:21:40 Speaker 02 Right.
1:21:40 Speaker 06 You want a fun little fact? You want a couple of full circles for you?
1:21:43 Speaker 02 Absolutely.
1:21:44 Speaker 06 I'm doing the work for you because I listened to it. I was like, I know this song. And then I was like, yes, it was on a later season of a little show called One Tree Hill, which I did watch, which is named after what?
1:21:55 Speaker 02 Sure.
1:21:56 Speaker 06 A song by U2.
1:21:57 Speaker 02 U2.
1:21:58 Speaker 06 And then another full circle, babe, God is within this episode because the video for You Found Me, which I still have not seen, was inspired by a film by Wim Wenders called Wings of Desire. Oh, yeah. What's that movie? That's the movie that was remade into City of Angels.
1:22:19 Speaker 02 Into City of Angels.
1:22:21 Speaker 06 About Seth and Maggie that inspired Iris.
1:22:23 Speaker 02 That was in a hospital.
1:22:24 Speaker 06 Iris was written.
1:22:25 Speaker 02 That was, it's a beautiful.
1:22:27 Speaker 06 I did a lot of work for you on this episode.
1:22:29 Speaker 02 You did a ton of work for me. You, you wrapped this up much more capably than I have ever wrapped up anything in my entire life. And I.
1:22:36 Speaker 06 I wanted to ask you as a sports person before we go, what sport do you think he is referencing in that lyric where there's eight seconds left? Is it hockey? It always felt like hockey to me. Does every sport have overtime? It's only if it's tied.
1:22:51 Speaker 02 I'm glad you came to me with this question. Those lines have a real politician trying to tweet about sports with no idea what they're actually talking about vibe to them. It's like, I cheer for both the Yankees and the Mets. Let me, let me look this up actually, because let's, let's do this.
1:23:07 Speaker 06 Eight seconds left in overtime.
1:23:09 Speaker 02 Seconds left in overtime. Okay. So here's the thing. Hockey is sudden death overtime.
1:23:16 Speaker 06 Okay.
1:23:17 Speaker 02 I presume this to be basketball. I don't know what she's doing in this scenario, but I, I'm going to assume that he's playing basketball and his team is losing with eight seconds left because hockey, it would be sudden death. And if, and you're either tied and you're just going to go to another overtime. 15 minutes, after you rest for 15 minutes, and that's not very dramatic. Like, I take it to mean that he is losing, you know, or maybe it's NFL overtime, which is needlessly confusing, you know, because like you can kick a field goal and then if they kick a field, you just keep like it's, these lyrics don't quite work.
1:23:49 Speaker 06 I hope William Simmons isn't listening to this part of the podcast.
1:23:53 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's, this is, it's charmingly clunky. It's like, it's like an 80% coherent sports reference, which I think is exactly the right amount of right that you want to be in this instance. I think it serves the song that it doesn't quite work as an individual line.
1:24:12 Speaker 06 It's so perfect. I think I thought hockey because this band is spiritually Canadian in a way that I can't put my finger on.
1:24:18 Speaker 02 I know exactly what you mean by that, but yeah, I don't think it's hockey, but we would have to talk to our good friend, Isaac, to really get the full scoop.
1:24:27 Speaker 06 He smiles politely back at you. You stand politely around some sort of window to your right. Are we done? Are we still recording?
1:24:41 Speaker 02 We are, we are still recording and we are also done. I am so grateful to you as always, Yasi. Enjoy Europe, enjoy your haircut, et cetera.
1:24:48 Speaker 06 Thank you, Rob.
1:24:48 Speaker 02 Enjoy the fray. Thank you.
1:24:50 Speaker 06 I love you very much. Goodbye.
1:24:51 Speaker 02 Likewise, love you too.
1:24:56 Speaker 02 Thanks very much to our guests this week, Yasi Salek. Thanks very much to our producers, Chris Sutton, Olivia Creary and Justin Sales. And thanks very much to you for listening. And now let's all go listen to How to Save a Life by The Fray. We'll see you next week.
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Previous “Ether”—Nas Next “Since U Been Gone”— Kelly Clarkson Page updated November 3, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated