This one’s all about emotion.
Scott Hutchison’s mum called him Frightened Rabbit as a pet name when he was a shy, anxious boy. He used it on stage when he started performing, and continued as the Scottish indie-rock band coalesced around him.
Swim was the single from 2009’s Winter of Mixed Drinks, their third album, which he said was about ‘pushing yourself out to the edge of things, feeling lost and not knowing where you are.’ Check out the official video on YouTube.
It opens with gorgeous chiming guitars, then begins:
I salute at the threshold of the North Sea of my mind
And I nod to the boredom that drove me here to face the tide
And I swim, I swim, oh swim
‘North Sea of my mind’: great line. He’s beating himself up for being weak:
Dip a toe in the ocean, oh how it hardens and it numbs
The rest of me is a version of man built to collapse in crumbs
And if I hadn’t come now to the coast to disappear
I may have died in a landslide of rocks and hopes and fears
and challenging himself: be strong; leave it behind:
So swim until you can’t see land
Swim until you can’t see land
Swim until you can’t see land
Are you a man? Are you a bag of sand?
(REPEATS)
The catchy chorus repeats and repeats and repeats to convey the verge-of-despair feeling of being about to dissolve. It’s an incantation, Hutchison’s nervy voice wrapped in a swirling curtain of sound. The words of the third verse fit the tune badly, on the edge of breaking down altogether:
Up to my knees now, do I wade, do I dive?
The sea has seen my like before, though it’s my first and perhaps last time
Let’s call me a baptist, call this a drowning of the past
She is there on the shoreline throwing stones at my back
(CHORUS)
A brief, quieter Bridge. Notice the movement from water’s edge, to dipping a toe, then knee deep, until he’s now way out of his depth:
And the water is taller than me
And the land is a marker line
All I have is a body adrift in water, salt and sky
(CHORUS)
Are you a man? Are you a bag of sand?
The chorus repeats, and then the last line repeats, over and over again. Half taunt, half plea, haunted and haunting. It also, tragically, foreshadows what came later: reported missing in May 2018, Hutchison’s body was found on the banks of the Firth of Forth, the death confirmed as suicide. The band no longer exists.
