images//tiffany yoon words//chris zakorchemny
The way success comes and goes, Scott Hutchison of Frightened Rabbit certainly had it coming. The Midnight Organ Fight captured the emotional decent of breaking up like few could and gained a massive following because so many could relate. Hutchison, on the other hand, was on the verge of breakdown toward the end of an arduous tour in support of the band’s breakthrough record. After a brief respite, he churned out The Winter of Mixed Drinks in less than a year and started touring again. We caught up with Frightened Rabbit’s lead singer on the doorsteps of the First Unitarian Church in Philadelphia, recalling our last interview on the floor of a boutique store.
I’d like to start where our last interview ended. It was one of the last U.S. support dates for The Midnight Organ Fight and you were talking about a kind of loneliness you were experiencing. You said that spending every day with the same people left nothing to talk about and that it even felt like “being way out at sea.” This theme pops up on “Swim Until You Can’t See Land,” and other songs on the new album.
I think just at that point, I was starting to think about that whole thing. It’s strange you should reference back to those things I said. Hopefully the album is a true reflection of that, because that was right near of that tour and we were ready to go home, for sure.
It just made so much sense when I first heard “Swim Until You Can’t See Land,” and thought about what you said. The only thing that threw me off was the female character you introduce.
The girl on the shoreline? It’s kind of the girl from The Midnight Organ Fight, really. In any long-term relationship there’s no straight end, and when you start a new relationship that person is completely aware – especially in my case, that person is acutely aware of the last girl.
[At this point, a slightly nervous, slightly drunk fan approaches us, asking for a picture with Scott. He welcomingly obliges. The fan can’t thank him enough.]
OK, here we go. What were we talking about? [Laughs]Oh yeah, about that acute awareness a person has about someone from an old relationship…and it had an effect. It continues to have an effect. Maybe it’s difficult for my current girlfriend to still hear those old songs.
So, if I have this right, you had those ideas about isolation and self-doubt – and then you just physically isolated yourself in the Scottish coastal town of Crail. It sounds like you already planned this album before you started getting to the writing.
Ideally, in the perfect world, it did work out like that. It was the right place at the right time to do the record. All I had was that title “Swim Until You Can’t See Land.” I was mulling it over on a daily basis, but it wasn’t until I actually went and it was all there first hand, and I was sort of in a sense …I wouldn’t go as far to call it rehab, but it was detox. It was a reconstitution of me physically, mentally – everything. Only then was it a reality and the influence of the coastal position I was in came into effect.
I noticed the only song credited in the liner notes to being recorded there was “Man / Bag of Sand.”
Yeah, there’s no studio there. I was just writing in a small house in Crail and demo-ing there. I really wanted one piece of music from that time to make it on to the record. It was important for me. That’s the only one that made it from start to finish. The rest was recorded in a fancy-schmancy studio and finished it off, as you can probably hear. It was important to get that one track sitting there amongst the rest to reference where it was from.
But you wrote and created the structure for every song there?
I wrote everything. All but one or two were written in Crail. I had a fairly regular regime, actually. I also slept really well, which was something I hadn’t done since I was in high school. I would be able to get up at 9:30 a.m. and go for a walk, do some work before lunchtime, have lunch, work up until dinner time, watch some TV and maybe have a glass of wine and watch a movie. I was quite stringent with my time and needed the routine.
The theme that is most resounding to me on the record is loneliness. Did you ever get caught up in that loneliness as you were writing?
Yeah, but it was a different kind of loneliness. It was welcome. I would less call it loneliness and more solitude. Loneliness for me is like we were talking about – being amongst of a ton of people that have no idea how to communicate or have no desire to communicate. That’s the loneliest I ever feel. Being by myself is far from lonely. The writing about the darker side was all about touring. Being alone physically didn’t contribute to the theme of loneliness.
But this album is more than about how you feel while touring, right?
There were a bunch of things I felt over that past year. It was losing sight of the original purpose of the band, losing sight of me as a person – the big old questions I’m sure I may never answer. It was about a lot of the ideas I got while touring, having lost sight of your own personality in some ways. Because playing the same songs every night, even that loses its purpose. It’s like ‘Why the fuck…this is stupid! It’s not even working for me anymore.’ Towards the end of that year and even last year, I didn’t enjoy playing live any more. I wasn’t gaining the same level of pleasure as I once did, which may sound selfish and spoiled, but I think it happens to a lot of people in that position.
I think traveling over a long period of time does weird things to your psyche. You have to contemplate what makes you happy again, or why you do the things you do.
It can make you contemplate or it can make you forget why you like the things you do. Especially on tour, it’s such an easy mode of escaping from the things you don’t necessarily like about yourself that inherently construct your character. You can lose them but it’s only temporary, and the people at home like you for those very reasons. When you lose that sense of humility, ego can take over. It’s kind of a typical band story.
Does that ego part of fronting a pretty successful a band ever scare you? Do you have to check yourself?
Yeah, and my brother [drummer Grant Hutchison] checks me as well. I mean, there are many more egotistical musicians than me, but I wouldn’t claim that I don’t have one, otherwise I wouldn’t be doing it. I mean, essentially, when you play your own show you have a room full of people saying ‘You’re fucking great! You’re really great!’ And that has a natural effect on anyone. It did on me, and I tried my best to block it out, but when I came back [to Scotland after touring] a lot of time was focused on escaping all of that and leaving the city where I could go out and drink, and the same might happen.
Is it weird to think about your touring life as separate from your normal life?
It is. It’s like a switch because it’s not a normal way to live. You have to become a slightly different person because otherwise I don’t think you could survive. It’s a survival skill, letting go of some of the preciousness and some of the subtle elements of your character. They can disappear. You try and not let it take over.
I won a t-shirt from your label, FatCat, with this design on it. I showed it to my dad and he saw that it had two crosses with a sad face in the middle. He said “They shouldn’t make fun of Jesus like that,” and I didn’t really think you were, but I had to at least consider that notion.
It’s nothing to do with Christianity because it’s not the same. It’s supposed to be almost the same, but it’s not. None of it means anything. I just made a bunch of symbols and once you’ve done that you can let it fly and see what people make of it. People have not been buying t-shirts because they’re not sure if they can get away with it in school or not, or maybe they have a religious leaning, but it’s not a Christian cross. It’s two bars.
I feel like I have to mind where I wear it, too.
That’s good. That makes me happy, actually. [Laughs]
Why? Because you have to be brave to wear a Frightened Rabbit t-shirt? [Laughs]
No, I don’t think so. It’s a meaningless symbol. It’s meaningless to begin with, like all symbols, and all they do is take on meaning with the amount of time they’re in existence. It has nothing to do with Christianity at all.
As soon as I heard that question, I was like, “Yeah, that would be really interesting to ask…”
Yeah, that’s a fair assumption to make but I’m not religious in the slightest. I am interested in that symbolism and the effect it can have on people. I like including religious images in song lyrics – it’s interesting to me even though I don’t believe in it. It has a pretty alarming power in the imagery it has. But I’m not interested in it as a mode to better myself.
Right, because whenever you reference religion in songs, like on the opening track “Things,” it just seems to be one of those…things you don’t need.
Yeah, you’re right. I don’t think I belittle it. I hope I don’t. I just express my opinion that it means nothing to me, really. Being alive is all there is, straight and simple. It’s all you have, really. I’ve expressed that in other songs.
So, going a bit wide with this question… what creates meaning in your life?
The people that you fill it with and the things you do. That guy earlier, do you think he was a bit drunk? Well, that guy – I did something right for him.
Well, a similar question that’s just as wide… when you hit a truly low point, in those kind of incurable restless heart-rules-your-head episodes, have you ever come across a consistent remedy to kind of make things OK again?
Before I wrote The Midnight Organ Fight, I was at a period of my life I’d still probably call the worst. All that happened, and all that happened after that, was that you reach this point where you’re like ‘Fuck, it doesn’t get any worse than this,’ and my body or my brain started rallying against it and saying ‘There’s nothing worth getting that sad about.’ I don’t know what gear it kicks in to stop that from happening, but since then it’s found a gear, which maybe makes me less caring but again, it’s like that survival mechanism from being on tour. It’s like a switch where obviously, I do care but I’m not going to let it keep me up at night. I don’t know exactly what, or specific rule about it is, but since that particularly awful time I’ve found myself much more capable of doing it. I had to. Otherwise I was going to lose friends, or pack this in…and it wasn’t worth packing all that in. There are more important things than girls. Maybe you can live by that!
You want to end it on that note?
Sure, why not! [Laughs]
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To find out more about Frightened Rabbit, check their website and MySpace page.
