The Winter of Mixed Drinks is the third album from the Scottish band Frightened Rabbit. Though dark, it's less melancholy than the band's previous records, one of which charts the breakdown of a relationship.

"[This] whole record is about moving on to another stage in life," frontman Scott Hutchison tells NPR's Guy Raz.

Themes of solitude and isolation pervade The Winter of Mixed Drinks. Hutchison says he wrote most of it while living in a remote village on the east coast of Scotland.

"I wasn't going out there to purposefully write an album," Hutchison says. "But it almost started flooding forth because I was there. The songs just started coming."

When Hutchison returned from his previous tour, he was essentially homeless — crashing at friends' flats and moving from place to place. But after getting an apartment of his own and improving his personal relationships, he says he found a more positive outlook on life.

"The more settled I became," he says, "the less melancholy was drifting around my head."

Still, The Winter of Mixed Drinks is hardly a happy album. Hutchison says it's just the kind of songwriter he is.

"Maybe everything I write is lined with a slight dark edge, and I can't help that," he says. "But there are more moments of joy on this album."

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