Don’t call The Fray a Christian band: They’re a secular band that just happens to mostly write songs about God, Jesus and Faith. One of the most prominent of the growing breed of Christian/Not Christian acts, this Denver piano-rock act has found greater success in the mainstream than they ever could have in the Christian Contemporary Music niche with their driving, soundtrack-ready ballads, most notably their inspirational “How to Save a Life,” a song that climbed the charts after a massive tie-in campaign with the TV drama “Grey’s Anatomy.” This February The Fray returned with a self-titled second album, where the band showed some newfound ferocity on their current hit “You Found Me,” a song singer Isaac Slade has described as a conversation with God about why bad things happen to good people.
Andrew McMahon, the heartthrob pianist behind this bill’s co-headliners, Jack’s Mannequin, has fond memories of Summerfest. It was the day of his 2006 performance at the festival that McMahon finished his treatment for the acute lymphoblastic leukemia he’d be diagnosed with in 2005. He’s been cancer-free ever since. (Evan Rytlewski)
