On Thursday evening, the Scottish police confirmed the identity of a body found near the Forth Road Bridge, in Port Edgar, Queensferry. Scott Hutchison, the vocalist and guitarist in the Scottish indie-rock band Frightened Rabbit, was declared dead at thirty-six. Two days earlier, Hutchison had posted a vague and melancholy farewell to his Twitter account: “I’m away now. Thanks.” His distraught bandmates had implored their fans to mobilize, asking anyone with information about his whereabouts to immediately contact the authorities. On Friday morning, Nicola Sturgeon, the First Minister of Scotland, expressed condolences, for both her electorate and the world. She described Hutchison as “a remarkable and much-loved talent.”
Hutchison had struggled with mental-health issues for years. His family released a statement: “Depression is a horrendous illness that does not give you any alert or indication as to when it will take hold of you.” Hutchison wrote often about the tedium and senselessness of his disease, its strange edges: “I woke up hurting, but I can’t quite say why,” he sings in “Woke Up Hurting,” from the band’s most recent album, “Painting of a Panic Attack.” Plenty of artists have worked to articulate, personify, unpack, vanquish, lament, or merely loosen the grip of their own suffering, but sadness is such a difficult thing to express with precision—it has no contours, no purchase. Still, Hutchison was a deft and nuanced lyricist. He gave shape to his struggles. “Woke Up Hurting” opens with a sharp portrait of depression’s relentlessness, the way it can suddenly reanimate itself:
Daybreak comes with the devil’s hum
A carcass starts to breathe
Wakes one more time to try and find
A place to count its teeth
Frightened Rabbit formed in Selkirk, a historic town in the Scottish Borders, in 2003—first as a solo vehicle for Hutchison’s songwriting, then as a duo with his brother Grant, and, eventually, as a full five-man band. Musically, the group felt of a piece with other Scottish indie-pop acts: Belle and Sebastian, Franz Ferdinand, Camera Obscura. But Frightened Rabbit was virtuosic when it came to expressing the odd anxieties of an early, hungover morning, when a person wakes up and has to reckon with herself, again—the relentless ennui of being, and being, and being, and being. The band released five full-length LPs between 2006 and 2016. While each had a particular sonic character, they were united chiefly by Hutchison’s presence. Nearly everything he wrote felt urgent and aching, and his round voice could be unbearably tender.
I’ve always had a particular fondness for “A Frightened Rabbit EP,” a three-song collection from 2011. The chorus of “Fuck this Place,” a duet with Camera Obscura’s Tracyanne Campbell—“Oh, I don’t know these buildings / I think I am lost”—is a heavy evocation of what it feels like to be adrift in your very own town. But it’s “The Work,” a duet with the Scottish folksinger Archie Fisher, that routinely makes me weep. Fisher was born in 1939, and released his astonishing début in 1968. He and Hutchison are, obviously, of very different generations, but they’re spiritually united by both a shared geography (Fisher was born in Glasgow, where Frightened Rabbit came to be based), and a specific kind of yearning. Fisher plays a beautiful, finger-picked guitar figure. When his vocal comes in, on the second verse, he sounds like Hutchison, plus forty-odd years; this gives the song a surreal quality, like a man engaged in conversation with a wiser version of himself. “The Work” is about what happens when you try your best to fix something, and nonetheless fail:
When the work stops working
What was light becomes a weight
When the work stops working
Shall we pack it all in
When the work stops working
And the weight becomes an ache
When the work stops working
Shall we pack it all in
Or start again
That the chorus ends with an unexpected moment of hopefulness (the radical notion that rebirth is possible, and can even be chosen) feels miraculous. It’s Fisher who sings the coda—“Or start again.” I wonder if Hutchison arranged the song that way simply because he needed to hear someone else say it. Whatever cosmology you subscribe to, the possibility of starting again, starting over, reëmerging from the ether, somehow—it’s such an empowering and intoxicating idea. Let’s try to hold it close today, and all days.
Sourse: newyorker.com
