Pedestrian Verse
I’ve been listening obsessively to Frightened Rabbit. This is my standard mode of musical engagement: fall hopelessly in love with an artist, composer, or band; listen to them and only them for an extended period; and then move on, as limerence gives way to durable affection. I am a serial monogamist of song.
One of the frustrations of musical illiteracy is that it’s difficult to articulate what’s moving me in the music I love. I suppose that’s why I feel the urge to make others listen—see below!—where I might use words to say what charms or fascinates me in a book. But even when music is accompanied by lyrics, I worry that words fail.
I’m sure this has been written about by others—I welcome reading suggestions—but beside the interaction of words with music, whose description turns on the literacy I lack, there’s the difficulty that the power of lyrics can depend on saying plainly, without poetry, what we feel. Music gives simplicity a force it rarely attains on the page. There is less to say about lyrics like this, as verse, than we might wish.1
Frightened Rabbit released five albums in a decade, the last in 2016, two years before their frontman and lyricist Scott Hutchison killed himself by drowning in the Firth of Forth. Their breakthrough album was their second, The Midnight Organ Fight, and it’s a heartbreaker. Its penultimate track is a romance with suicide in which the singer decides to live—for no articulate reason:
Fully clothed, I’ll float away down the Forth, into the seaI think I'll save suicide for another day.
In the second, final chorus, suicidal ideation is transformed into survival fantasy: “I'll steer myself through chopping waves / as manic gulls scream, ‘It's okay!’” And the final line extends the singer’s reprieve: “I think I'll save suicide for another year.”
All painfully matter-of-fact—more so in retrospect. But Hutchison has a poet’s ear for metaphor. The song begins with a permanent goodbye and the inability to breathe:
And the door shut shut I was vacuum packed, shrink-wrapped out of air and the spine collapsed and the eyes rolled back to stare at my starving brain.
The impersonal grammar of the third line is dissociation incarnate: a picture of a body unensouled. The same technique appears in the album’s opening track, “The Modern Leper,” performed here by Hutchison, alone:
The cripple of the first verse is the singer as third person—“he's got all the things a cripple has not, two working arms and legs”—but the rest of the song is addressed by him to you.
Depression as leprosy: not just a physical disease but a proverbially contagious one. This song enacts its theme of senseless, risky repetition, iterating anxiously—“Is that you in front of me / coming back for even more of exactly the same?”—on its way to an impossible truth:
I'm lying on the ground now and you walk in through the only door I have lost my eyesight like I said I would, but I still know.That that is you in front of me and you are back for even more of exactly the same
I wish I could communicate why Hutchison’s lyrics affect me so profoundly—beyond the teenage thrill of being known, as I sing silent karaoke and play air guitar to deafening headphones in my room. When I first heard “Heads Rolls Off,” a song about mortality on The Midnight Organ Fight, I wept at its consoling lines, “while I'm alive / I'll make tiny changes to Earth,” but I couldn’t make a case for that response, even to my later self. The music video is primitive but pretty great:
Hutchison, too, marks the ambiguous relationship between lyrics and poems. After his death, his words were published in a book by Faber & Faber, where T. S. Eliot had been responsible for editions of W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and Ted Hughes. One of the “poems” is “Dead Now”—from an album called Pedestrian Verse, which was Hutchison’s favourite—set out on the page with stanzas, end-stops and enjambments. Its closing refrain:
There is something wrong with me and it reads nothing like poetry
BONUS CONTENT: Hutchison performs solo in an intimate side-gig at Boston Calling, 2017.
BONUS BONUS CONTENT: Ted Gioia asks why music is getting sadder.
What insights appear below are due to conversations with Marah Gubar.