Jeff Vrabel

Star correspondent

Frightened Rabbit’s music is grand and dreamy and often sad as heartbreak, which is why I don’t often play it in front of my 4-year-old. But to prep for a chat with singer/core Scott Hutchison, we sampled the band’s sterling new “Paintings of a Panic Attack,” which opens with a lovely, pulsing track called “Death Dream.” You can probably guess what it’s about. The band’s grandeur swirls around behind Hutchison’s rich, syrupy voice, a Scottish brogue that he lets crack at just the right times. Like the best Frightened Rabbit tracks — which is a lot of them — it’s melancholy enough to fit inside a cathedral. And midway through, my 4-year-old son wanders in, having heard the song from the living room, and he’s sobbing. Just sobbing. “Daddy,” he’s wailing, “Can you change the song?”

Well, I changed the song. But if that sort of thing is your band’s specialty, it’s — in a weird way — not the worst reaction to get. “That’s a very genuine reaction, right?” asks the amiable Hutchison, when I mention how he briefly sort of emotionally wrecked my kid. “I don’t ever intend to make kids cry, but on that level it’s the most genuine reaction I could hope to achieve.”

This all sounds depressing as hell and would be if not for two things: 1. For four albums, Frightened Rabbit has proven itself exceedingly gifted at writing about the sad nights but but also because of 2. The hopeful arc of the music. For all its lyrical sadness, it hangs onto that glimmer of hope, or, if not hope, at least the sense that you might as well try again sometime.

“Paintings,” their fifth record, required Hutchison to address a host of changes. First was geography: Prior to writing the record, Hutchison had moved to L.A. to be with his girlfriend, which kept the band members separated by an ocean and an America. “It was a challenge, but we took the tactic of, ‘Let’s embrace this whole thing.’” he says.

Hutchison, in the California sun, used the relative isolation to learn Pro Tools, sketching songs not just on piano and guitar but with drum pads and his laptop. Back in Glasgow, the band was writing independently for the first time. “I don’t want to say it was a case of ‘Oh the teacher’s away so you can do whatever you want,’” Hutchison says, “but I think they found a liberty too. There were songs that came fully formed, and I just threw lyrics on at the end. Which is great — I didn’t have to do anything,” he laughed.

The group would assemble songs remotely, sending parts and sketches into each other’s inboxes, something the band had never really done before. “I came to embrace it,” says Hutchison. “We said, ‘Let’s not go down the path we’ve traveled quite often over the past 10 years. Getting songs where my input had been removed entirely really helped us move forward.” The distance, he says, helped the collaborative process. “In a weird way, it was easier than sitting in a room and staring at each other. Your opinions could be more thought out, processed over time. There were a few instances where what might have sounded blunt in conversation came across much better over email,” he says. “Those obstacles became something that defined the record.”

Also new was producer Aaron Dessner of the National, a band that knows a thing or two about lush sadness. Dessner was especially instrumental on closing track “Die Like a Rich Boy,” the other half of the album’s death bookends and a moment of restraint. It almost sounds like a demo, because it is.

Hutchison actually recorded the stark sendoff first as a dance track — “it was weird, the production was weird,” he says. Reaction wasn’t great, so he shelved it. A year later, he found himself in Big Bear Lake north of L.A., on one of those isolated-cabin writing retreats you don’t think actually ever happen, came across the weird original and decided it was worth a second go. “I found something more touching about it then,” he says. “The lead vocal and almost everything else is a demo. I recorded the guitar on a cheap mic, and Aaron was like, ‘How did you do that?’ I’m like, well, I laid it on a table, and I played?” he laughs.

Dessner laid that less-is-more approach everywhere. “He was extremely good at pulling us away from the tricks and habits and tropes I’d perhaps been using,” Hutchison says. “He’s amazing at letting a song breathe and be what it should be instead of forcing it into another territory. ‘Die’ could have gone overblown, full string section, lots of bells and whistles. Sometimes you write a song and you immediately want to send it to everyone you know, and that’s an example. It came to be something much more than it started as.”

Happily, Hutchison seems more settled than his lyrics suggest. He never really gelled in L.A., so he and his girlfriend relocated to Hudson, N.Y. The band’s Indianapolis spot is part of a summer-long tour that will hit Lollapalooza and other fests. And earlier this April they released a video for “Woke Up Hurting” that was shot in… um, an abandoned German hospital. Probably won’t be letting the 4-year-old watch that.