OTR, Take 60: Frightened Rabit - The Midnight Organ Fight

I hate when I feel like this, and I never hated you

Earlier this year, I mentioned that I would start rolling out some OTRs featuring my favorite records, the ones so close to me that I feel are constitutive parts of me. I've done a few (The Moon and Antarctica, Cherry Tree, Speaking in Tongues) and let me tell you, they take it out of me.

Please pull up this masterpiece of a record while reading: Tidal / Spotify

Most editions of On the Record are, as I think of them, something of a magic trick: I pull out a record from the shelves, play it a few times, find some theme or themes that are initially not obviously related to the real story of that edition, weave, play with themes, and then by the end the Prestige – a reveal that ties things together in such a way that a bunch of seemingly unrelated pieces now cohere. It's yeoman's work. I like to think it's skillful work, but I'm really not the best person to judge that, huh? This still has a small distro list, so I guess maybe not that skillful!

But the albums that are foundational to who I am are different. There's no trick that's going to be enough. There has to be something of an expurgation of my soul onto these digital pages. If I'm going to present to you something that I love, that is somehow of me and I of it, I feel as though I have to do both it and me justice. This one is especially dear to me, so please forgive me if this slips into inanity. I'm determined to publish.

I'll turn off the TV, it's killing us, we never speak
There's a radio in the corner that's dying to make us see

I first found The Midnight Organ Fight in the first semester of my 3L year. (Had a moment of deja vu and remembered I wrote about this, a little bit, when I wrote about the band's Pedestrian Verse.)

The first thing you need to know about Frightened Rabbit is that they are a band of Scotsmen. Why is that important? It's a whole mood, a sardonic turn of mind and attitude. Here in the US, we tend to think of the inhabitants of the British Isles as somewhat uniform, but that is quite off. The English are different from the Welsh are different from the Scottish are different from the Irish. Entirely different cultures, attitudes, and histories. Despite the reputation for being seething crazy redheads (and some are!), the Scottish are in many ways the most civilized of the lot.

But the "dour Scot" is a stereotype for a reason. (Hell, "dour" is a Scots word meaning relentlessly severe, stern, or gloomy. I love the word, from the old Gaelic dúr.) Scott Hutchinson was a form of the dour Scot: gloomy in tone, wildly honest in ways most of us are uncomfortable being, and unapologetically forthright.

The Midnight Organ Fight is his account of an especially painful breakup. It is unlike anything you've ever heard and, perhaps, something you will recognize immediately if you have the capacity to be honest with yourself.

If we both got the same diseases, it's irrelevant, girl

Every relationship I've been in have flashpoint memories that, while tiny moments, come to embody something key about the relationship. I suspect the same is true for you, if you think back. Tiny moments that go unseen, perhaps unnoticed, by the other person but that are revelatory to you.

Being an uncivilized 27 year old male, I remember being very excited to share The Midnight Organ Fight with my girlfriend. She had decent music taste and I loved this album. It didn't occur to me what sharing the album might convey to her, nor did it occur to me what an off-handed comment of hers might reveal to me.

One night, after I made a nice dinner (nice by law-school-budget standards, anyway), we curled up on the couch and I put on this album. I have only a vague recollection of listening to the first part of the album with her – only that she liked it well enough. "Keep Yourself Warm" came on, though, I remember this very well indeed.

Here's the chorus of the song:

Can you see in the dark?
Can you see the look on your face?
The flashing white light's been turned off
You don't know who's in your bed

It takes more than fucking someone you don't know
To keep warm
Do you really think that for a house beat
You'll find your love in a hole?

But you won't find love in a
Won't find love in a hole
It takes more than fucking someone
To keep yourself warm

As the song came to the end of the second chorus, after Scott sang, "It takes more than fucking someone to keep yourself warm," she whispered in my ear, "That's not true."

Lift your dress enough to show me those shins
Let your hair stick to your forehead

One of the things that I try to do in my writing – here, in Bitter Buffaloes, in my fiction, on LinkedIn – is to say the things that we shy away from saying, at least without some veneer of respectability. Many of you are lawyers or in professions where a certain decorum are required.

This neuters us, if we let it. We express ourselves in an acceptable, presentable manner. No wonder so many of us begin sounding like reverberations rather than people with a distinct experience trying desperately to reach other people to feel less alone.

I don't think it's an accident that the art that I love most is almost always transgressive. Honest in distinctly uncomfortable ways. My favorite writers and musicians destabilize in order to invite in. They do this in different ways: plainspoken stories that do not flinch from the details of the tale, deliberately "offensive" in an effort to reveal the absurdity of the norm that is being broken, terse understatement or manic maximalism.

There's something to be said for just saying the fucking thing, without stopping to set up the best pose for the press photo. Sometimes we need to show the bloodied face, the hurt, the unresolved pain. There's nothing remarkable about the lyrics to "My Backwards Walk" except the sparseness of it, the unmitigated heartbreak seeking both escape and reentry. For once, I'm going to simply give it to you without exegesis.

I'm working on my backwards walk
Walking with no shoes or socks
And when the time rewinds to the end of May
I wish we'd never met, then met today

I'm working on my faults and cracks
Filling in the blanks and gaps
And when I write them out they don't make sense
I need you to pencil in the rest

I'm working on drawing a straight line
And I'll draw until I get one right
It's bold and dark girl, can't you see
I done drawn a line between you and me

I'm working on erasing you
Just don't have the proper tools
I get hammered, forget that you exist
There's no way I'm forgetting this

I'm working hard on walking out
Shoes keep sticking to the ground
My clothes won't let me close the door
Cause my trousers seem to love your floor

I been working on my backwards walk
There's nowhere else for me to go
Except back to you just one last time
Say yes before I change my mind
Say yes before I
You're the shit and I'm knee-deep in it
You're the shit and I'm knee-deep in it, you're
You're the shit and I'm knee-deep in it
You're the shit and I'm knee-deep in it, you're

Once in my life I want to be brave and talented enough to just say the fucking thing so clearly.

It's got lots to do with magnets and the pull of the moon

We've gotten 1500 words in and I haven't touched on the two things that drew me in the first place to this album this morning. The first: this album sounds great. It is beautifully recorded and played imperfectly, giving it that raw edge that helps it ring true. I give you the two quietest songs on the album.

The first, "Good Arms vs. Bad Arms," has a gorgeous cascading Bb - Gm7 - D#add9 chord progression that propels the song long before the shuffling drums of Scott's brother, Grant, enter the mix. It is a stunner of a song. Take a listen.

The second, "Poke" is one of the most heartbreaking elegies to a dying love, and the struggle at the end around whether to fight for it or "kick its cunt in and watch as it dies of bleeding." Can you tell me you haven't felt something like this acutely? If so, I am deeply and sincerely sorry.

You should look through some old photos
I adored you in every one of those
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

I am armed with the past, and the will, and a brick

Hanging over any piece about Frightened Rabbit is the inevitable fact that Scott, the beautiful soul behind these songs, killed himself. It's easy, as they say, to connect the dots in hindsight. Hell, one of the songs on The Midnight Organ Fight, "Floating in the Forth" is a song about suicide – and he died by wandering out into and drowning in the Forth. All of the signs were there, if you knew what to look for.

After someone like Scott kills himself, the easy, disingenuous response is something like, “He was so talented, I wouldn’t have ever thought he’d do this!” Except that isn’t true in the slightest. 

It was clear that he could do this. He was telling us the entire damn time. His songs were gifts, yes, but also the work of a man so aware, so keyed into the world and his own existence that if you really listen, you begin to wonder how he lasted so long. 

The mystery is how those of us who become aware of the hurt, absurdity, and ruthless beauty of this life—who are able to articulate this knowledge so that others might also have access—are able to hold on long enough to gift these works of art. Hold tightly those around you who have this kind of insight, who are able to get it out in words or songs or in visual form. They feel everything and it is often too much to bear. 

I miss you, buddy.

When my blood stops, someone else's will not
When my head rolls off, someone else's will turn
You can mark my words, I'll make changes to earth
While I'm alive, I'll make tiny changes to earth