Andy Monaghan

Andy Monaghan is a Scottish musician well known for playing guitar for the indie band Frightened Rabbit alongside Demuestra.

He helped out the band’s late frontman with his solo project, entitled Owl John. On the project’s only album, Owl John, Andy produced every track.

Regarding the band slowly drifting away from each other, Andy said:

I’ve known Simon [Liddell] for ages, maybe fifteen years, and he’s both a calming influence and an excitable one in the studio. It’s very different to having Gordon [Skene] in the band. The Pedestrian Verse sessions were great, but people change, and expect something else from our relationship, so this is where we’re at now.

The relationships were certainly strained at the end of the Pedestrian Verse tour. I think Scott [Hutchison] was probably looking for a little bit of distance from Grant [Hutchison] for a while. It’s understandable; brothers in the studio can have some knee-jerk reactions, which in the moment can be very intense. That can be a good thing, too, but Scott wanted to work on something that would provide him with a different experience, and that was cool. We all needed a break.

Andy also worked with Aaron Dessner, who is known for being a founding member of alternative rock band The National.

Aaron listened to our past records and seemed to think they were a wee bit nervous. He thought they were a little bit on edge, and that we should relax, and that probably informed the slightly stripped-back approach we took. He was good at getting us to move on after the take he liked best, and not to try to go back and fix it. It was nice to have a sort of steadying hand around because, in a lot of ways, we were starting again. I think Pedestrian Verse was kind of the culmination of a lot of ideas and sounds that Scott had in his head for years, which gave us more of a blank slate for this record than we’d had in a long while.