Formed in: 2003, Selkirk, Scotland
Key Albums: Sing the Greys (2006), The Midnight Organ Fight (2008)
Frightened Rabbit are a four-piece band from Selkirk, Scotland, now based in Glasgow. Essentially the work of songwriter/frontman Scott Hutchison, Frightened Rabbit play intense, emotional guitar-rock, categorized by Hutchison's raw vocals, and predilection for writing songs about heartbreak.
“If people were to perceive me through only listening to my songs, they’d think I must be fairly miserable, and that I’m one of those fellows who things just aren’t workin’ out for,” says Hutchison.
Background
Frightened Rabbit began as Scott Hutchison's side-project in 2003. Rather than performing under his own name, Hutchison took on a band's name, and took his chosen handle from childhood memories.
“You know those times when you were a kid, and you were forced to socialise with your parents’ friends’ children, and they’re not necessarily your friends?” asks Hutchison, rhetorically. “I hated those social situations, so I’d more often than not go off and sit in the corner. And my mum would say I had this ‘frightened rabbit look’, that I was just totally weary and anxious to be around other children. Socially maladjusted, even then.”
Hutchison grew up playing guitar, and spent his teenaged years playing in high-school bands covering Jimmy Eat World and Foo Fighters, writing songs of his own was something Hutchison “didn’t even have the notion that [he] could actually do”. Until, one day, in 2003, a song came forth.
“I didn’t decide to start writing songs,” recounts Hutchison. “I just wrote a song; it kind of appeared from out of nowhere. And that broke the dam, so to speak."
Beginnings
From that very first song, Hutchison has written songs about a singular subject: heartbreak. "It seems everything has stemmed from that one source of inspiration, from that same place. They’re all from the angle of heartache and anxiety. That first song [that I wrote] was about relationship I was having at the time, which is obviously the theme of the new record as well. It’s the thing I seem to most write about.”
Hutchison spent three years home-recording and assembling the sad, sad songs that would populate the first Frightened Rabbit record, 2006's Sing The Greys. Made with his brother, Grant, whilst they were students at the Glasgow School of Art, Hutchison thought of his band as a "hobby" even after they'd released their first record.
Arrival
2008's The Midnight Organ Fight was the Frightened Rabbit record to reach the world at large. Making the album was a veritable confessional for Hutchison, who laid out the ugly details of a failing relationship, from the perspective of the embittered man, on its songs.
With lines like “it takes more than f**king someone you don’t know to keep warm” and “you’re the sh*t and I’m knee-deep in it,” Hutchison’s savage words are occasionally reminiscent of Arab Strap’s Aidan Moffat. But, where Moffat delivered his own frank lyrics in a blunt, Scots brogue, Hutchison favours a keening falsetto; and, where Arab Strap were kept in time by a metronomic drum-machine, Frightened Rabbit sound more evocative of fanciful English indie-rockers of the '80s, James.
"I've laid out a significant portion of my life on this record," Hutchison says. And, he continues, given that "almost everyone in the world as had their heart broken, at some point of their lives," there's no reason why Frightened Rabbit's woe-betold tales can't find a large audience.
