Sean O'Kane

They never really collaborated, but Glen Hansard’s death today has dredged up a lot of feelings about Scott Hutchison’s (of Frightened Rabbit) suicide eight years ago. I don’t think any musician’s death has ever affected me as much, or ever will.

I loved a lot of Frightened Rabbit’s music, especially Pedestrian Verse, the band’s fourth album and — blasphemy — its major label debut. It has all the hallmarks of one: richer sound from (presumably) better equipment, more ambitious arrangement, wider distribution. There are tracks when you can practically feel the label pressure to “be more Modest Mouse” (on “Oil Slick”) or “be more Arcade Fire” (on “Late March, Death March”). It feels, in the music and the lyrics and even the album cover, like an album of reckoning with God, which naturally means reckoning with death.

I wasn’t a devotee by any means, but I think there are some clear reasons why Hutchison’s death hit me so hard then, and again in recent years, all the way up to this morning while I was mowing the lawn.

One is that his struggles are just so plainly there in every song. It’s almost embarrassing to pull out a lyric and point to it as a harbinger that he would die the way he did, because there’s little subtext to it.

Still — there’s Hutchison on the first song of Frightened Rabbit’s first album, wasting no time getting right into it. “What’s the blues, when you’ve got the greys? I think I’ve given up, my body’s given in.”

Or in the conclusion of “Nitrous Gas,” from Pedestrian Verse, with Hutchison backed by a chorus: “And if happiness won’t live with me, I think I can live with that. You can keep all your oxygen, hand me the nitrous gas.”

Hutchison wrote with an eye on the horizon of life, like he was constantly sizing up where and when it would end. And to hear, in May 2018, that he just up and left his hotel in the middle of the night and drowned himself in the neighboring water — it still feels like such a consuming and lonely way to die.

It was made more tragic then, and feels a little insane to remember now, that his death was preceded by two tweets, where he told his followers to “be good to everyone you love” while claiming he failed to do the same, before posting: “I’m away now. Thanks.”

The thing is, as much as Hutchison’s music was laden with death and sadness, his performances always emphasized togetherness. He was constantly bringing tour mates onstage during Frightened Rabbit songs, or sheepishly joining those other acts’ sets. Here he is in some dim backstage somewhere laughing off how Manchester Orchestra’s Andy Hull needs to use his phone to remember the words to “Architect” — a song they cowrote — as they sing together, Hutchison’s sorrowful voice slotting in neatly underneath Hull’s falsetto.

Hell, the last tweet he sent before the two that preceded his death was him praising Frank Turner for praising Hutchison’s “supergroup” Mastersystem, which included his brother. The man loved making and sharing music with everyone.

My enduring memory of Hutchison is from a show at Webster Hall in October 2013, when near the end of the set he ascended to the balcony with just his acoustic guitar and sang a song to the room. It’s a thing I’d seen many artists do in various ways before. But it struck me then and stings me now that it may have meant as much or more to Hutchison to have a quieted crowd sing along with him than it has to any other artist.

Hansard had a much different life and career, one that was far more in the spotlight and inevitably affected many more people who are devastated by his loss. My heart goes out to them today. My head will be swimming with Hutchison and Frightened Rabbit.