#19 - Frightened Rabbit - Pedestrian Verse

Frightened Rabbit - Pedestrian Verse 

Atlantic, 2013

I have such a vivid memory of listening to this for the first time. We were living in Minneapolis and I was having a foot issue where the running had caused the joint on my right foot to become inflamed and made walking a nightmare. So I went out to Bloomington to a store that specializes in orthotics. It was a typical miserable cold February day where the highways were bleached with salt. It felt like the perfect landscape for my most anticipated album of the year. When the band came to the Twin Cities on tour in support of the album, I didn’t go. I could have gone. But these were the lean years. But honestly, were they really that lean? We could have gone. Why didn’t we go. “I’ll catch them next time,” I thought. Plenty of artists I love have committed suicide, but Scott Hutchison’s is one I still feel every single day. There’s a melancholy for Scott that never quite leaves my heart. I’m getting teary eyed even writing this. Not like I knew the guy, but the way he put himself out there in his songs you felt like he did. That is what made Frightened Rabbit so special. Scott sang to you of his deepest, darkest anxieties, loneliness, heartbreaks, hopelessness, perversions, and death fantasies and the result you felt like you weren’t alone because you felt some of the same things. It’s why the group’s breakout The Midnight Organ Fight got its own tribute album in 2019. That is an album that means so much to so many people, and I know all of those people have a little piece of their heart permanently broken. 

It took a while before I could listen to Frightened Rabbit. I listened to Scott’s last record--released under the Mastersystem moniker--and could barely get through it. It felt like an uncomfortable wake. “I can’t wait to end the day, most of the time,” he sings on “Proper Home.” “If the curtain dropped tomorrow, I wouldn’t mind.” And then there’s the last song, “Bird is Bored of Flying” which I listened to half drunk in tears on my back patio. I hadn’t listened to Pedestrian Verse since his death and it’s hard to listen to these later Frightened Rabbit albums without hearing someone suffering. Painting of a Panic Attack in particular is a brutal listen, and while Pedestrian Verse has some lines that stab at your heart (“There is something wrong with me” on “Dead Now” is one that still hits me) but for the most part this album does what every album but Painting of a Panic Attack does: It’s morose, it’s gloomy, but there’s always a thin glimmer of hope at the end of the tunnel.

I haven’t had a space to verbalize how much this still hurts. Elliott Smith, David Foster Wallace, Jason Molina, and David Berman are all deaths that had a profound effect on me and still fill me with sadness, but Scott’s still feels like a tremendous weight and I can’t even imagine how it must feel for his loved ones. I just feel like his music did so much to help me as a person, that I wish there had been a way I could have helped him. The Midnight Organ Fight, The Winter of Mixed Drinks, and Pedestrian Verse are all albums that have made me feel less alone by virtue of someone being brave enough to talk about how it really feels to be a human being.