On some lyrics from Frightened Rabbit’s “State Hospital”
In the days after Scott Hutchison killed himself, I listened to Frightened Rabbit a lot and wondered how and why the songs had insisted themselves so intricately into my life over the last ten years.
I think part of the answer is the lyrics, even though I generally either don’t pay much attention to lyrics, or only pay attention after I already connect to a song.
Their songs can seem conventional if you hear them in passing, on shuffle — somewhat quirky, somewhat Scottish-y with a recognizable well-produced 2000s-2010s “indie-rock” sound. But on second and third and millionth listen the songs have a certain unique keening edge, a certain controlled looping quality, a certain willingness to explore and experiment and go too far on the edges. And then there is the way the music and the lyrics work together.
One beautifully constructed song is the patient lament “State Hospital” from Pedestrian Verse, a song that tells the life story of a girl born from a state hospital into a violent childhood in a community and city where she grows up “accustomed to hearing that she could never run far.”
Here are some thoughts about the lyrics and how they give the song its power and meaning:
1.
“Brought home to breathe smoke”
The phrases “brought home” and “breathe smoke” mirror each other in the rhythm and in their sounds, the “BR-,” the “O.” Home is in the same position as smoke. Home is smoke.
2.
“A slipped disc in the spine of community
A bloody curse word in a pedestrian verse”
Both lines are metaphors for the situation of the young woman in her world, and it’s ambiguous whether the young woman is being told this is who she is, or if this is who she sees herself to be. There’s a powerful sense of the way this world limits her power to define herself. To compare a life to a slipped disc in a spine and curse word in a plain poem at first seems to emphasize how this person is outcast, vulgar, wrong. But there’s more — the slipped disc causes pain to the whole body, the bloody curse word is an irrepressible expression of that suffering. There is a life here that is connected to the larger world, that must be heard by that larger world.
3.
“She cries on the high street just to be heard
A screaming anchor for nothing in particular
At the foot of the fuck of it dragging her heels in the dirt”
Here the “I” sound in “crIes,” the sound of the cry, is picked up in “hIgh street” — there is the sound of individual suffering within a faceless community both in the picture painted and in the words themselves.
And, in the next line, “anchor” and “particular” nearly rhyme, connecting the two phrases, giving sensory life to the paradox of a life lived under both a crushing weight and a sense of meaninglessness.
And the “F”s (“the Foot of the Fuck of it”) into the “D”s (Dragging her heels in the Dirt) give the specific frustration, a feeling of both being stuck and furiously holding on, physical presence.
(As a sidenote, Frightened Rabbit songs make a great argument for the power and possibilities of the word “fuck.”)
4.
“All thighs, hair and magpie handbags, Saturday’s uniform for the ‘fuck me’ parade”
So much care with the music in words here. The insistent “I”s and “A”s in “thIGhs, haIr and mAgpIe hAndbags” fall into the rhythmic lockstop of, first, “Saturday” with “uniform” and, then, “fuck me” with “parade,” getting across both the relentless pressure and oppressive limits of this world.
5.
“Her heart beats like a breezeblock thrown down the stairs”
Again, there’s a lot of music in the words here that’s fitting for the sound and feeling of an out-of-control, even destructive, pounding heartbeat — the “E”s of “bEats” and “brEEzes,” the “B”s, the near rhyme of “thrown down” — but it’s the content of the comparison that gets me here. To compare a heartbeat to a breezeblock (what I knew of as a cinderblock where I grew up) thrown down stairs is unexpected — a comparison I have never heard before — almost uncomfortably sensory, and intimately connected to the landscape that contains and dictates the life described, a place of common construction debris from either new blank alien buildings or decaying industrial ruins.
6.
The ending of the song opens out into a qualified simple statement of hope, half declaration and half plea, more authentic for being so hard-won. Compared to the density of the rest of the song’s lyrics, it’s oddly straightforward and repetitive, a chant or a prayer:
“If blood is thicker than concrete
All is not lost
All is not lost
All is not lost
All is not lost
All is not lost.”
Another song of theirs that ends in a similar way is the Pedestrian Verse album closer “The Oil Slick.” It begins with a few burbling, musically awkward verses with typically vivid and layered lyrics about the struggle of trying and failing to “find a song” compared to the way a bird is held back from flight by the dampening weight of an oil slick on its wings. The end of the song opens out into another qualified but straightforward declaration of hope amid oppressive, inescapable difficulties:
“There is light but there’s a tunnel to crawl through
There is love but misery loves you
We’ve still got hope so I think we’ll be fine
In these disastrous times, disastrous times.”
So many of the songs are sad and even despairing, it’s true. But even in that despair they use music and language to face the despair, to name it and struggle against it and imagine a way through it. The songs try to find the song, even now.
