I saw a post this week from Hanif Abdurraqib commemorating your birthday, and when I woke up this morning these words were screaming to get out. So I’m going to write you a letter, because I miss you so much and I had no actual relationship with you except as a fan. But god, you mattered so much to me. Matter so much to me.
I remember in 2018 when I got the news that you were missing. Your family put out calls to help find you, calls that were eventually successful in the worst possible way. When your body was found, when we learned that the day you had told us you’d save for the future finally came, it destroyed me. For at least a decade, your voice had bouyed me through the good, the bad, and the mundanity of life. Your songs, your lyrics, your work had at times truly saved my life by giving me something to hide in, to scream along to and cry to and feel seen by. And now you are gone.
I still miss you so much.
For years after your death I couldn’t listen to your music. I was so thankful that you initiated a tribute album to Midnight Organ Fight; it gave me a way to keep your words close without being overwhelmed with grief and sadness. I spent so much time late at night, drunk, crying and watching videos of your friends singing your songs as well. All of this helped, because your music is so important to me that even if someone else is performing it, I can still access all the memories of my life that I’ve connected to your songs.
I guess sometime into the pandemic, the grief I felt from living in this world became so large that it felt commensurate to the grief that I have over your loss, and suddenly I could start listening to you again. Which probably explains why, as I write this at 6:30 in the morning, I’m writing through sobs. The grief from your absence is still so present in me. I feel it every time I listen to your music. It’s just, I also feel that grief anytime I’m not listening to your music now. The world you left behind is a horror show and the horrors are only increasing.
Thank you for creating a body of work that was not afraid of these horrors. Your music makes me feel anchored, helps me feel stable. You saw the shit, you saw the joy, and you saw all the humans doing everything, and you described the world with elegant, brutal accuracy. Thank you for that.
I first encountered your music from a music blogger in 2008, right around the time Midnight Organ Fight dropped. I cannot remember if I purchased it or pirated it, I’m sorry. I own it on vinyl now, I did buy it eventually. I have listened to that album so many times that I… I’m at a loss for any silly hyperbole about it. Hundreds of times. Thousands maybe. You can put on any song from that album and I can sing it from front to back, including attempting to capture your accented pronunciation of each syllable. When I am sad, that type of sad when every single molecule in my body feels like it weighs as much as this planet, when nothing is appealing to me except wallowing and staring into the distance, I can put on Poke and you meet me right there. Actually, every single song on that album is attached to varying moods, and without fail turning on your music and singing along somehow both embraces the emotion and releases it.
When my kids were young, I had to rock them to sleep every night. They would not fall asleep on their own, and so I would spend 20 minutes to an hour every night rocking a baby in my arms. Both of my girls needed this. I was no good at lullabyes, never learned them, didn’t care about them, so I sang my girls my favorite songs. The most common song I sang was Heads Roll Off. Yes, it’s a song about dying, and not believing in religion, but it’s also a song with the chorus that has become—I can’t believe I’m writing these words but I am being as honest as possible—the closest thing I have to a religious credo.
When my head rolls off, someone elses will turn / while I’m alive, I’ll make tiny changes to earth.
I sang that to my girls every night, and now when I listen to that song, I feel the grief of your loss, and the joy of their existence, and while that seems like it should be unbearable to hold together, it isn’t. It just means when I listen to that song I remember that the world, as immense as it is, contains wonders and horrors alike. And we get to make tiny changes, if we want to.
Once, Abdurraqib put out a call on his social media, asking fans of you, of Frightened Rabbit, to call in and share memories. So I did, I called in and he put my recording at the very beginning of the podcast episode. I’m not sure if you can tell I was lightly crying while I talked, but I was. I told how, to further remember those nights of singing my kids your words, of hoping that they too would grow up and make tiny changes to earth, I got a tattoo.
It’s a solid line tattoo of a square, just one thin line creating a 3" square, on my bicep. And underneath, written in my own handwriting, are your words “make tiny changes to earth.” The purpose of the square is so that my kids could draw in it; so that they could make tiny changes to dad, which they have done over the years. Ghosts and kittens and stick figures and hearts, temporarily filling up the square.
I still tear up every time I tell the story of that tattoo.
Each of your albums met me at different periods of my life and became new life preservers I could hold onto as I navigated being alive. The Winter Of Mixed Drinks came out when my life was pretty stable, but when I later went through a shitty divorce, I spent hours walking around Philly late at night blasting this album (particularly The Loneliness and the Scream) while sobbing. I eagerly purchased your following albums and went to see the band as soon as you came to town, wherever I was.
I had one other friend all through those years who loved your music as much as I did. We saw you together live for the first time, at a tiny ass club in Birmingham, AL. The lineup included We Were Promised Jetpacks, and the Twilight Sad. We pressed up against the stage amongst a crowd of other fans and we sang along with every word as you played. That was the first of six times I had the joy of seeing you live; each time an opportunity to let loose with all the passion I could muster to sing along.
You were singing during my favorite concert experience ever. It was the tour where you opened for The National, although I only went to see Frightened Rabbit. The show was at an outdoor, uncovered amphitheatre. Right before you went on, it started drizzling after threatening to do so for an hour. You came out, and played the set, just 5 songs, because openers never get enough time. But you ended on The Loneliness and the Scream, and so there we were, 50 or so Frightened Rabbit fans, pushed against each other in the pit in the soft rain, screaming along with the melodies at the end of the song, as you and the band finished playing. It feels ironic, that this beautiful moment of community and joy arose from a song about being so alone that you could scream, but that’s what you do so well. You stare at all the shit we do as humans, and you write beautiful songs about how shitty it is.
Your fans love you so much, because of this. We are humans who don’t want to write off the world, we want to make sense of the world, we want to truly see it for what it is. Your songs and lyrics make us feel seen, and bring us together, even when you are writing about the utter mess of relationships and guilt and shame.
I know I’m not alone because in one of the cruelest ironies of life; your music was one of the points of connection between my partner and I, even though we met years after you died.
A few days after I met her, while we were doing that new crush thing of asking questions about things we love to see if our crush shares our passions, she sent me a text message: “Do you know Frightened Rabbit?”
Scott, I can’t tell you what it’s like to meet someone who loves an artist as much as you do, on just as many levels as you do. I can’t tell you because even though I experienced it, I just don’t know how to describe it. But meet we did, and found that we had each seen you live an equal number of times (6) and both, despite each having gotten rid of most of our belongings for different reasons in the years before we met, had Frightened Rabbit memorabilia that we held on to. We knew all the words, loved the same songs for different reasons. The album we put on after we first had sex was Midnight Organ Fight. That’s weird to tell you but I don’t care, it’s true. You always fought to tell the truth, even when it feels bad.
When we moved in together we made a shrine to Frightened Rabbit. It’s right in the entry way of our house. We jointly made a large piece of art with your double cross and lung/liver/heart drawings, and hung it up. Your memory is alive in our home. We tell everyone who comes over this story, we rave about your music and how important it is to us. Most people vaguely recall hearing the name of your band. They’re missing out on so much.
I miss you so much.
There’s so much more to say, but I will stop here. Thank you for your music, for your work, for your willingness to explore the complexity of being alive. You made so many tiny changes to earth while you were alive. I’m eternally grateful to have found your music and to have it with me as I suffer through this world. Thank you for all the work.
