![]() ![]() And, absurdly, in the midst of the beautiful cacophony, came a crass, stark refrain, repeated like a mantra: “It takes more than f - ing someone you don’t know to keep warm.” Hutchison didn’t believe in anything beyond this life, but when I talk about light that emanates from his songs, I call it spiritual. ![]() The song built and built until it couldn’t be restrained any longer, exploding into churning guitars and synths and drums that thundered like judgment day. Try to listen to the emotion beneath it.” After a long pause (trying to find the play button, relighting the bowl, who knows), a warbling organ began to cycle through three notes, followed by the driving JUN, JUN-JUN of a solemn eclectic guitar. I was listening to the local hippie college radio station when the voice of the obviously stoned student DJ interrupted the music: “This next song has some… questionable language… but there’s a lot more to it. I was a teenager, living at my parents’ house, driving home from my job in the grocery store produce department. I don’t know how old I was, exactly, when I first heard Frightened Rabbit. He floats in the Forth.Īs the song crescendos, Hutchison intones, “I think I’ll save suicide for another year.” Seagulls call out to him: “It’s okay / Take your life, Give it a shake / Gather up all your loose change.” He’s not sinking in the river. Hutchison doesn’t leave this world but, still dressed, climbs into a boat and gently drifts to a bay where this earth is kinder, softer. But Hutchison envisioned his escape not as an end, but a passage to somewhere else: “On the Northern side / There’s a Fife of mine / And a boat in the port for me, / And fully clothed, I float away (I’ll float away).” It’s not Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind vision of the end where we are sucked from our clothes into another life. By the next verse, he is asking himself, “Am I ready to leap? / Is there peace beneath / The roar of the Forth Road bridge?” When the oxygen is sucked from your life and everything begins to cave in on itself, finding a way out of that life feels like the only option. On “Floating in the Forth,” the penultimate song on 2007’s Midnight Organ Fight, he describes sitting alone “vacuum packed / shrink wrapped out of air” after the final departure of a lover. You’ll just have to learn to love the leper. Don’t expect something different, he warns. “Someday, someone’s gonna break your heart.” Then he starts “Modern Leper,” a song that finds him warning his lover that she is “coming back for even more of exactly the same,” that she must be a masochist to keep loving someone who has crippled himself by repeating the same mistakes. In a 2013 performance at End of the Road Festival, Hutchison stops to address a baby chirping happily in the front row: “It gets so much worse.” He laughs. On “I Forgot the Fall,” Hutchison sings, “These bones do break / Boy, learn from your mistakes if you don’t want another cast around your arm… We’ll walk for years just to find a way here again.” He was 29. Their songs often emphasized just how impossible it can feel to climb your way out of the deep wells of desperation and anxiety. The Foundation (mental health organization) aims to “raise awareness of mental health and challenge perceptions of mental health problems by creating great art.” The Foundation (band) released an album in 2011 that wrestled with these themes, shedding light on the problems by narrating them. He joined with other Scottish musicians to create Fruit Tree Foundation, an indie folk supergroup associated with U.K.’s Mental Health Foundation. He’s said in interviews that he loved the thrill of being a rock star, but he loved the music itself more. He drank too much that night out of nerves and excitement, and installed a firm two drink limit for himself before shows from then on. The first show he played out of town, he had to take the public bus. It began as a solo project, just Hutchison and an acoustic guitar. Hutchison formed Frightened Rabbit in 2003, named after the childhood nickname given to him by his mother because he was a shy child: “chronically so.” The name was a way of reclaiming that identity, embracing the shivering scared parts of himself and mounting a small skirmish against feeling trapped within his fears. I didn’t live by that standard and it kills me. ![]() The singer of the indie rock band Frightened Rabbit had disappeared the day before. Scott Hutchison’s body was found in Port Edgar, Scotland, Thursday night, the tenth of May. ![]()
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