Franz Ferdinand frontman Alex Kapranos has been talking about that new album and says that Bob Dylan has been an influence on it. As previously reported (yawn) the band are releasing a second eponymous album, with the same artwork as their debut album, the two only distinguished by colour scheme.
Kapranos told Rolling Stone: "I was reading (Dylan's memoir) 'Chronicles', and he was talking about when he first came to the Bleecker Street scene in the early 60s, and how they would go through newspapers and pick a character and base a song upon that character and represent him as a hero. 'The Ballad Of Billy the Kid' is very much like that - In reality, Billy The Kid just stole, but in the song, he steals from the rich and gives to the poor. That's fantastic." Kapranos went on to say that he'd copied the tactic in new song 'The Fallen' which is about a friend of the singer: "He did a few things that caused him to be almost a social outcast - he'd fallen from grace. He's a very enigmatic character."
Kapranos also talked about going back to Scotland to record the album: "When I went back to Glasgow, it was almost like I hadn't been away. I was going out to parties with pretty much the same set of people I was hanging out with before we went on tour, before the album came out, and they talked to me exactly the same way. It's not as if we decided to abandon our whole lives for some facile celebrity lifestyle."