Nick A'd me something

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Dear Nick,

I did meet Scott over a decade ago at Glastonbury. It was at the top of a hill in a tiny hut overlooking the very same side stage where I would subsequently watch Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood play an impromptu duo show.

It was also the same weekend I ended up on Willie Nelson’s tour bus with Snoop Dogg.

AND, the same weekend where I enjoyed the best tea of my life courtesy of my pal Sadie. I reference this moment in the song Peaks & Valleys:

But do you remember, the night got late?
Equations were recalculating in my veins
And you saved my life in the final round
Some kind of paper cup tea, some hell-bath festival ground

It was a formative time.

I’d heard the name Frightened Rabbit but wasn’t familiar with the music. My friend Stu recognized singer Scott Hutchison and suggested we go say hello. I introduced myself to the guys and mentioned I was from Canada. We had a pleasant chat about mutual pals in Canadian bands like Wintersleep and Broken Social Scene.

It wasn’t until months (years?) later that I actually got around to listening to Frightened Rabbit, so I have to admit I missed the initial wave of their rise. It was their music video for The Woodpile that grabbed me. The song felt paradoxically patient and urgent. The video so very Scottish but with an M. Night Shyamalanian twist. And the lyrics so direct and relatable:

Bereft of all social charms
I'm struck dumb by the hand of fear
I've fallen into the corner's arms
Same way that I've done for years

I'm trapped in a collapsing building
Come find me now, we'll hideout
We'll speak in our secret tongues

Will you come back to my corner?
Spent too long alone tonight
Would you come and brighten my corner?
A lit torch to the woodpile high

We’ve all felt alone in a room full of people and Scott had an acute ability to communicate the nuance of his anxiety. The “secret tongues” line is specifically brilliant.

I spent some time with albums like The Midnight Organ Fight and Pedestrian Verse. Scott’s writing is excruciatingly transparent. There aren’t many people who can be so expositional about their mental health without leaning on cliché; a pitfall which he avoided deftly.

And so, I admired them from afar for years until seeing these tweets from the band’s Twitter account:

And this image was making its way around the internet. It was so real life. This was not a picture of a famous musician. It was the picture of somebody’s son - somebody’s brother.

It seemed like the entire UK was out scouring the streets with lanterns. And then, on May 11th, it was announced that his body had been found. I was serving my kids cereal when I saw a notification pop up on my phone.

I stepped away to read more about what had happened and eventually found Scott’s personal Twitter page. I read these two tweets and just completely lost it:

The brevity and poetry of his last broadcast. I barely knew him, but the tragedy was too much. I started bawling uncontrollably.

Bowie and Prince had died in recent years but I felt Scott’s death with 100x the intensity. We were about the same age. We had mutual pals. He likely had no memory of meeting me but it didn’t matter - I felt in him a kindred understanding.

How could he provide so much respite and joy for others but not for himself? Could his gift to alleviate other peoples’ existential dread not alleviate some of his own?

That morning was the only time I can remember crying while taking a shower. I won’t lie, it was an annoyingly Hollywood-esque moment, but the face slap of mortality is all-consuming and strikes without warning. The thing was, I had to get on with the day. I had errands to run. And so I imagined fleets of Frightened Rabbit fans all over the globe trying to make their way to work.

These words came:

Now we’re crying in the shower
Crying in the car park
Crying in the office towers

And they repeated in my head throughout the day. By the afternoon, I’d sat at the piano and worked out a clunky rough version of the chord progression.

Then came a line that kind of says it all, but succinctly. I don’t know if I’ve written a better lyric than this:

Why can’t the see-ers see a way out?

If ignorance is bliss, then enlightenment is hell. And Scott had that sage-like insight.

In The Woodpile, he asks for someone to come and “brighten his corner”. It felt as though I was writing a sibling song…

So come find us if you can
We’ll be unified and sad
We’ll be in your corner

Leave a light on when it’s bad
We will congregate and make a plan
We’ll be in your corner

I liked the idea of a “sadness squad” speaking in secret tongues and rising to action when the bat signal hits the sky. That the people who understand us most could congregate at the door and remind us that life is absurd and painful and beautiful and that we’re just tiny specks of space dust endlessly making sense of whatever we have, whenever we have it.

It does occur to me now that when people are at their lowest, the idea of their ongoing struggle becoming a burden to the very people they love - maybe it compounds the suffering. But to love and care is a gift to the lovers and the carers. I wonder if that is some of what gets lost.

I wrote In Your Corner for Scott Hutchison, but as it lives and breathes today, five years on, I think it’s for any of us in the moments where it could help. We all ebb and flow. Rise and fall. And my hope is that the song could speak in secret tongues to anybody feeling the momentum of an existential decline.

Scott’s family created an organization called Tiny Changes (a reference from Scott’s song Head Rolls Off). They do amazing work raising awareness and providing mental health support, particularly in the UK.

If anybody reading this feels lost, in need of someone in their corner, please please please find a mental health professional with which you can speak, or call your local suicide prevention service. Do not suffer alone.

We need you here with us. We’ll be unified and sad.