29 March 2007
There’s a whole sub-genre of ’00s landfill indie and alt-rock that soundtracked deathbed scenes in Grey’s Anatomy. If you, a Grey’s Anatomy character, caught the swelling strains of Snow Patrol’s ‘Chasing Cars’, for instance, you weren’t much longer for this world. ‘How To Save A Life’, title irony and all, is another song whose prominence comes from standing on top of the ’00s US TV hospital drama body count. The Fray already had an Irish top 30 single to their credit, and they’ll have a top five hit here the following year, apparently without any further loss of fictional life.
You can understand why ‘How To Save A Life’ got cherry-picked for morbid small-screen melodramatic duty. The piano line is blandly melancholic, the vocal and guitar are mildly urgent, and the lyrics are vaguely emotive: ideal sonic set design while someone in a foreground ICU bed starts metaphorically moving towards the white light. It’s hard to hate too much upon such a mild-mannered track or on The Fray themselves, a more sincere and less obnoxious Maroon 5 ploughing the same furrow of post-grunge US ‘adult contemporary’ rock. Your local FM stations have loved this stuff since the ’00s. I’d get worried, though, if I were to hear it on hospital radio.
