In the May 2009 issue of In Tune, the Fray's Isaac Slade explained how playing the piano influences his songwriting and arranging. Read below for more:

What’s your preferred instrument for songwriting?
Isaac Slade: I wrote my first song on the guitar and immediately switched over to the piano because I had a lot more control over it. I played piano in church for seven years and that's where I got my chops.

What drew me to the piano more than the guitar, at least at first, was that you could be the whole band: you could have the rhythms, and you could have the bass in the left hand, you could have little chords filling out the middle section and have little fills on the right. You could be the whole five or ten-piece band—and the singer at the same time.

Some of your songs seem guitar-driven: Do you also write on guitar? How do you integrate the two instruments?
Isaac Slade: It’s easier to write rock on guitar because I can get the groove more easily. For me there's less to worry about because I only know like 15 chords and then use a capo up and down the neck to change keys. It’s sort of a stripped-down approach for me. It frees me up to just focus on the melody and how it's playing against the actual chord changes. And then when I take [the song] to piano, it's a more expansive view. That's where I flesh stuff out. I'll go, “Oh, the guitar comes in up here,” and I'll mimic with a high part on the piano. Or sometimes I come up with a bass change and make a note to have the bass player try it.

Did you take formal lessons? Isaac Slade: I had three or four teachers growing up. I always got to he point where I had to learn to [sight] read music or stop—and I always stopped. I could never break through that wall. But I'm actually in the middle of trying to break through that wall now [Slade is studying to sight-read]. I can tell you what the note is but I can't sight-read to save my life. It’s a really limiting factor and I wish my parents had forced me to do it when I was a teenager.

You write interesting chords… Isaac Slade: My great-grandpa had an organ and he would sit there searching for the perfect chord. He didn't really play songs—or melodies. He just played chords. He’d start on A minor and add a seventh [G] and add a ninth [B] and then drop the bass and add like a clarinet sound on top of it and then change it to a sixth and then suspend it. I didn’t know what he was doing at the time but it seemed he was in pursuit of the perfect chord. There was always something in the background and then there’s the melody, the story in the middle—whether it's the melody on an instrument or a vocal with a lyric. I learned really early on that music is all about that story.

At the very beginning I just started writing melodies without really knowing what they were. I loved the fifths and octaves. My first song—I recorded it on a cassette when I was 15—I listened to it the other day with my family and we just burst out laughing. It was hilarious because it kept coming to that big crescendo and it would stop and go back into it, and was eight minutes long!

You’ve said that you took up the piano when you were forced to stop singing for health reasons. When you did start singing again, how did the piano and your voice connect?
: I grew up in church and I always assumed the ultimate was playing an instrument and singing. When you’re telling a melodic story, that’s one thing, but it doesn’t always connect, especially to people who aren’t into music. There were people in my church that would stand up in front of all the people every week and sing these songs about life and God and the struggles between the two, and early on that was the ultimate. So as soon as the doctor said the nodules went away and I could sing again it was like some kind of release from prison. I started writing furiously because I was so stoked I could start reaching out.