Skip The Youth
Last fall, my parents sold their house in New Jersey. I was in Japan at the time on business, which is something I can’t imagine my 24-year-old self would have understood as anything other than a joke. Like, a really, really funny joke. The kind of joke that’s so funny you die laughing.
Who cares what a 24-year-old would have thought? Well, I do, I guess… mostly because I’ve been misremembering 2008 as the last really great year.
It turns out that this was not an isolated incident.
I’ve been doing a little digging back through what remains of the paper trail I left in my mid-20s. A few years back I deleted most of it, but my first blog (on Blogger!) is still there, just password protected. I’d almost forgotten about it.
It turns out that, actually, 2008 was bad.
It’s like something out of a time capsule. We still had AIM, and Gawker, and hipsters, and CHECKS. Actual physical checks. And I lived in Philadelphia, and I needed quarters for laundry, and boys were breaking up with me via instant messenger probably because we still had to use T-9 on dumbphones.
I discovered Frightened Rabbit in August of 2008, and today, May 11, 2018, Scott Hutchison, the frontman, lyricist, and soul of the band was discovered dead, presumably a suicide.
He sang honestly and earnestly about his struggles with depression and love and hope, and the first time I heard Keep Yourself Warm — in the first few months of my exploration of the indie music blog scene — I felt something.
I don’t know, you know, what that something was. I didn’t know then and I don’t know now, other than the need to listen to it over and over again. And then to discover that there was a whole album surrounding it?
I never got over this album. Never. I‘ve listened to it consistently for 10 years, gravitating from one song to another, even listing it in my OKCupid profile as one of five things I couldn’t live without. That brought me to another fan, one I’ve spent the last half decade with, with whom I’ve belted out the songs in the car on plenty of occasions. Both of us, who at some time felt broken — who maybe still feel broken from time to time — connecting through a third person we’ve never really met, but whom we felt like we knew.
A few months back I thought about how many times I’d seen them live. The first, in February of 2009, in a tiny boutique in Philadelphia. It was an acoustic show and we sat on the floor on pillows, surrounded by expensive clothing that would never fit me. I was 5 feet away from the band, and the 50 or so of us there watched, alternately enraptured and punchy, singing along as they performed the entirety of the album — out of order. I felt awful, physically, still getting over an extended bout of bronchitis I’d picked up during the Obama inauguration, but we the audience chatted with Scott, trading easy jokes, and laughing. He asked who else was going to go see Lykke Li (another time capsule, that).
Time telescopes into itself after that and I can’t remember when exactly I saw them next, but it was in Philadelphia, certainly, and the venue (was it the TLA? Bob and Barbara’s?) bigger. The performance already much more assured.
In 2010, they released another album. Happier, poppier, lusher. I felt happier, poppier, and lusher, too. I wasn’t crying all the time at the very least, or falling asleep on trains, or buses. I fell in love with a boy and then we broke up and I tried to find someone else appropriate to fall in love with (there were plenty of inappropriate men I fell in love with but this is not that essay), but instead devoted myself more to Philadelphia.
I’d buy records on vinyl just down the street from where I first saw Frightened Rabbit in Old City. I’d work on myself in therapy on Walnut Street and then eat the leftover feelings at Capogiro Gelato near Rittenhouse Square. I mourned breakups in the backs of the Ritz Theaters, buying tickets to keep from going home and facing the wreck of my studio apartment on Arch Street that I managed to fill with books, Chinese delivery, and trash.
At some point (or rather, at a specific point, namely December 2012), I moved to San Francisco. I’d been promised fog and happiness. I was lonely and poor in a city of extreme wealth. I missed my life in Philadelphia.
A few months after I moved, two things happened. There was a Frightened Rabbit show at the Fillmore, and I had a date to it. Pedestrian Verse had just been released and Scott Hutchison seemed happy. We both were! He poured his heart out on stage and I made out with this boy (a 12th year PhD candidate or something along those lines) and then we took the bus home together to our shared terrible neighborhood, parted, and then I never saw him again. At least I’d gotten a free poster.
6 months later, Frightened Rabbit returned, this time to The Warfield, and now I had friends. One of them, Laura, had had a tough go of it, and had also become a devotee of the band. We sang along and danced. Scott sang “Poke” alone onstage, and the air broke apart in some alchemical fashion and when he finished the room had changed. He said “That was my favorite time I’ve ever sang this song,” or something to that effect.
Maybe he said that to all the girls, so to speak, but it felt special anyway.
I know I saw them at least one more time here in the Bay Area. It might have been twice. It seems unimaginable that I didn’t see them live with Evan, the man who came into my life in part because of them, but who knows? I know we saw Scott himself do a solo show, but it didn’t stick for some reason. The memory becomes fuzzier the closer in it gets. Maybe we saw the band together at The Fox in Oakland, a year or so before we moved in together, but I can’t remember.
I do know I saw them once more with Laura, at the Masonic, about a year and a half ago, probably. We watched from the seats upstairs, and the band and the lights and the smoke seemed very far away, and I thought “When did Frightened Rabbit figure out how to be rock stars?” To go from that tiny boutique on 2nd Street in Philadelphia to this place 3,000 miles and almost a decade away, where everyone knew every word, and instead of being humans they were gods of catharsis.
But now that’s all over, I guess. 10 years gone, a person gone, a city gone, a childhood home gone, but a new home gained, a new city gained, a new person gained. My mid-30s instead of my mid-20s, and there is still the unending fear of failure and of emptiness and that it’s all about to slip away immediately, with no notice. Especially now, you know? 2018 is bad.
On the upside, maybe things will be worse in ten years and I’ll be thinking “I miss 2018,” forgetting all of this terrible nowness from some gulag somewhere.
