The Fray tours behind sophomore album

There's a lot of downtime on tours, but members of the piano-driven Colorado pop band The Fray made sure they kept busy while on the road supporting their self-titled record.

"I personally listen to a lot of music," said drummer Ben Wysocki during an interview with SoundSpike. "I might take a nap or talk to my wife. Before we left, we packed a ping-pong table, scooters and bicycles on the bus. There's a lot of that going on. Lately, we've all just been playing with our iPhones because the new update came out and we're all kind of geeks about that. Everyone's been staring at their iPhones for the last couple days. We're held captive."

On this tour, the group--which also includes singer/pianist Isaac Slade, guitarist/vocalist Joe King and guitarist Dave Welsh--is celebrating the success of its self-titled sophomore album, which debuted at No. 1 on The Billboard 200 album chart. The record's successful debut was fueled by the omnipresent first single, "You Found Me," which made its primetime debut in an exclusive video for ABC's hit show "Lost."

Since forming in 2002, The Fray has struck a huge chord with audiences and turned its organic, grassroots success into worldwide sales of 3.2 million albums and more than eight million digital singles sold.

But with its sophomore effort, Wysocki explained, The Fray is a new band--a sentiment that led the group to title the set simply "The Fray."

"We just kind of put off the process of naming it," he said with a laugh. "But then once we really started thinking about it--somebody brought up the self-titled idea--the more that we thought about it and talked it over, it made a lot of sense. We think that this new record kind of sums up who we are a lot better than the first one even did. Maybe it's because we know better how to express ourselves through the songs. We've gotten a little bit better as musicians.

"It's almost like the first record is the handshake," he added. "This is the conversation where you really get to know somebody. The more chances you have to share yourselves with people through music, the more you get to share. The fact that this is simply self-titled, I think, is pretty fitting because there's a lot more of us than any other record we've made."

Wysocki called the writing process for "The Fray" a collaborative and democratic one, with each band member equally contributing to the album.

"Both albums were [collaborative], but this one definitely is much more than the first," Wysocki said. "Every day, we learn more about being in a band and how to do that.

"These four members have not been the only lineup in the band. I actually replaced my best friend, who originally used to play drums. It was super early in the game that the members sort of changed around. The first record had pieces of songs or parts of songs that other members had contributed to or written. This record was just the four of us over the course of a couple years, writing and creating. There were a couple songs that were 100 percent collaborations that came out of just us playing in a room and assembling some ideas that came out of that. We haven't really settled on one writing method. Sometimes, it'll come out of a little demo that Joe e-mails, or come out of three hours of just playing in a room together. It's a pretty wide variety of sources."

This time around, to ease the burden of having to pen a new album in its entirety after getting off tour, The Fray is learning how to write while on the road. There are already some new ideas "brewing," he said.

"We're trying to get a lot better about how to fit that into the tour schedule," Wysocki said. "On the last record, we got super burned out because we simply forgot about the fact that we still have to create and be creative. We just kind of got into that grind. We got home and we were very creatively thirsty. This time around, we're figuring out how to make that more of the touring-schedule process. We got a pile of stuff that's brewing and we're excited to dig into it."