Scott Hutchison, singer and songwriter for the Scottish band Frightened Rabbit, wrote their 2008 album The Midnight Organ Fight after the disintegration of a romantic relationship, and it shows. It’s a classic breakup album, a portrait of intense emotional pain, and Hutchison’s heartbreak pours out of song after song, through both his writing and his vocal delivery. It’s not a hopeless album, though. Moments of humor and sweetness thread through the record, albeit sometimes only highlighting how dark their surroundings are.
There’s a throwaway track called “Who’d You Kill Now” at the end of the album, but the real peak is the penultimate song, “Floating In The Forth”, which lays out the agony starkly but lands on uplift:
So you just stepped out
Of the front of my house
And I’ll never see you again
I closed my eyes for a second
And when they opened
You weren’t there
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 brainAnd fully clothed, I float away
Down the Forth, into the sea
I think I’ll save suicide for another day.
It’s hard not to just quote the whole thing. Hutchison captures the final gut-punch perfectly, that moment when you know that the whole thing is well and truly over. He describes himself standing on the Forth Road Bridge, wondering if there is peace beneath, asking, “Am I ready to leap?” In the final words of the song, he says, “I think I’ll save suicide for another year.”
Sadly, he meant it. On May 9, 2018, just a few weeks after the 10th anniversary of The Midnight Organ Fight, Scott Hutchison went missing. His body was found the next day, on the banks of the river Forth, near the Forth Road Bridge. He was 36 years old.
I’m not writing this post to investigate Scott Hutchison’s pain. He clearly suffered from depression, and it killed him. It is a terrible, sometimes lethal disease that has touched many people close to me, but Hutchison isn’t my proxy for writing about it. No, I want to write about this album because, as gut-wrenching as it is to lose someone, it’s worth celebrating what they gave us when they were here, and The Midnight Organ Fight is an achievement worth every accolade.
It’s a very Scottish album. It’s not so much the mentions of the Forth and Scottish rain — specific Scottish references are quite infrequent, really. It’s more in Hutchison’s delivery, the strong Glaswegian accent that gives such a strong flavor to phrases like “put the brakes”, and “how things used to be”, and “like they did in ’43”, just to pick a few examples from the lovely song “Old, Old Fashioned.” It’s the fantastic images — the dancing partner from “The Twist”, the love buried in snow from “Poke” — with a distinctly Northern feel. It’s the diction, phrases like “sexy clothes or graces”, “just rattling through life”, or “I’ll stow away my greys.” I’m a bit of a Scotophile, so the whole thing has a vibe I just love.
There’s so much anguish in this collection, and so many perfect expressions of it. “I might not want you back, but I want to kill him.” “I’m working on erasing you / I just don’t have the proper tools / I get hammered, forget that you exist / There’s no way I’m forgetting this.” “If someone took a picture of us now they’d need to be told / That we had ever clung and tied / A navy knot with arms at night / I’d say she was his sister but she doesn’t have his nose / And now we’re unrelated and rid of all the shit we hated / But I hate when I feel like this / And I never hated you.” “Well, I crippled your heart a hundred times / And I still can’t work out why.”
Every time I start quoting it, I want to quote the whole thing, which doesn’t exactly qualify as writing about an album. So let’s just posit that this is a nearly perfect breakup album, and instead focus on a couple of outliers. “Keep Yourself Warm” isn’t a divorce song — instead it focuses on the dizzying rush of lust as two people throw themselves at each other. This isn’t hearts and flowers territory, though — the narrator sings “I’m drunk, I’m drunk / And you’re probably on pills / If we both got the same diseases / It’s irrelevant, girl.” And at the end of that hormone race, he’s left only with a little hard-won wisdom: “It takes more than fucking someone you don’t know to keep yourself warm.”
My favorite song on the album, though, isn’t about love, lust, or relationships at all. It’s a song called “Head Rolls Off”, which finds Hutchison trying to penetrate the mystery of spirituality and faith. Traditional religion won’t do it for him — “Jesus,” he says, “is just a Spanish boy’s name.”
But in his own mortality, within the context of the world around him, he finds something grand and sacred:
When it’s all gone, something carries on
And it’s not morbid at all
Just when nature’s had enough of you
When my blood stops, someone else’s will not
When my head rolls off, someone else’s will turn
And while I’m alive, I’ll make tiny changes to earth
The music, stirring as it is throughout this album, reaches a higher level on this song. Guitars ring in gorgeous harmonies as drummer Grant Hutchison (Scott’s brother) channels Larry Mullen circa 1982 to drive the song forward. Frightened Rabbit songs often feel like they have an Awesome dial that gets turned up in the last 30-60 seconds of the track, and this one is no exception, as more guitar harmonies layer in and ecstatic bass holds up the whole structure. All the while, Scott Hutchison repeats the lines, “Tiny changes to earth… tiny changes to earth.”
Nature hadn’t had enough of Scott Hutchison, but he’d had enough of himself. And now he’s gone, but something carries on indeed. His bandmates and family established the charity Tiny Changes, which works to support and educate kids about mental health issues. And he leaves behind a body of work whose emotional power only gets deeper with time.
They are tiny changes to earth, but they mean more than he ever knew.
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