By February of 2005, the 33-year-old Kapranos, along with guitarist Nick McCarthy, 30; drummer Paul Thomson, 30; and bassist Bob Hardy (the baby, at 25), was back in the studio; or rather, in the old farmhouse the singer recently bought in the Scottish countryside. The music business, so famous for operating in dog years, may have led the band to feel old before their time (with quick-rising Next Big Things like the Futureheads and Kaiser Chiefs scaling the ranks, says McCarthy wryly, ''We're definitely like granddads now. After a year! It's really weird''), but that's not the reason they went back to recording so quickly. ''If you ask a band what their favorite song in the set is, it's always the new one,'' Kapranos explains. ''And I think sometimes when a band spends too long on the road promoting one album, you can see they become sick of it. We didn't want to do that. We stopped touring nine months after our record came out, which in modern recording industry terms is silly, we should have done at least another six months or even a year.'' The resulting sales of the band's debut have hardly been shabby — more than 3 million worldwide, including 1 million in the U.S. alone — but, to their credit, strategy seems like something they genuinely don't worry about.
They also steadfastly refuse to be bothered, at least on the record, by the anticipation surrounding their upcoming release (and the attendant industry vultures that circle all sophomore efforts of newly successful bands, ready to dive-bomb at the first sign of weakness). ''I'm not thinking about how people are going to react to it,'' Kapranos insists. ''And I'm not thinking about the next year of touring [U.S. dates go late September through mid-October]. I know it's going to be exciting, but I like living for the moment. I think most bands do.''
And aside from that newly purchased farmhouse, there's little evidence that the band is in hot pursuit of the stuff Behind the Music dreams are made of. True, Kapranos now dates former tourmate and fellow indie rock idol Eleanor Friedberger of the Fiery Furnaces, and Thomson has formed his own label, New!, but its output so far consists mostly of friends and family—a single featuring the band's early-'80s heroes, the Fire Engines, and an upcoming single by McCarthy's wife's band, White Nights. McCarthy himself, who has already earned a showman reputation for his Glimmer Twins routine with Kapranos on stage, all scissor kicks and sexy struts, is quick to puncture notions of a Stones-like legacy: ''We're all pretty aware that the normal life span of a band is like four or five years,'' he shrugs. ''I don't really like groups that go on ages and ages and ages and milk it; I'd rather be doing something else.''
In interviews, Thomson and Hardy certainly look like they'd rather be doing anything else; Thomson seems to save his energy for the stage, where he becomes intensely focused. For Hardy, it's about mildly upgrading his stoic demeanor once he's in front of the crowd, from Root Canal Patient to something more akin to Man Waiting in Line at the DMV. When the tape recorders are turned off, though, he relaxes, and will even smile when his bandmates recall his favored status in Japan. ''Christ,'' McCarthy laughs, ''we were in Tokyo last year, and all these girls ran up to Bob screaming, 'Can I hug you? Bobu-san!' Crying and everything. Amazing.''
