Listen For The Proper Tools

“I’m working on erasing you. I just don’t have the proper tools.”

Five years ago, Scott Hutchison, frontman for the band Frightened Rabbit, took his own life. He was found dead floating in an estuary near Edinburgh. What made this so chilling was this is exactly how he vocalized his imagined suicide on their song “Floating in the Forth,” the penultimate track of their album, The Midnight Organ Fight. His struggles with mental health were widely known and a frequent topic of his music.

And fully clothed, I float away
Down the Forth, into the sea
I’ll steer myself
Through drunken waves
These manic gulls
Scream it’s okay
Take your life
Give it a shake
Gather up all your loose change
I think I’ll save suicide for another year.

He sounds tormented by his desire to be dead. If you listen to it, the above section is striking in how triumphant it sounds. It builds into a rousing anthem. This album is a rousing anthem. It’s proof that heavy thoughts don’t need to be met with distressed sonics. In fact, the reward for sharing what burdens you can be invigorating.

The Midnight Organ Fight is full of soulful ballads that make agony sound like ecstasy (like a Scottish Weeknd?). “The Modern Leper” is the love you feel for someone who keeps showing up. “My Backwards Walk” is a toxic relationship you can’t quit. “Keep Yourself Warm” is the self-destruction you find comfort in. And of course, the aforementioned “Floating in the Forth” — a haunting imagination of death, eyes rolling back “to stare at my starving brain.”

Toxic endeavors, loving a broken person, self-sabotage—these are far from original ideas, but what made them so effective on Midnight Organ Fight was how providential it sounded. I’ve gone running to this album. I’ve felt blissful to it. I’ve played it on my way to a bar to see friends. I’ve played it at a bar with friends! Major depression and personal despair was so damn…catchy.

Despite the guy at every summer party who still insists on telling you this, Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” has a similar effect. A rollicking and anthemic American song highlighting a disgraceful reality in America. The knowing finesse of Springsteen is his ability to sing the quiet part out loud and make it so physical and alive that it fills stadiums and transcends time. He wields one of music’s most powerful weapons: juxtaposition. The heaviest of hearts, the bitterest of attitudes, the dirtiest of minds, and the most poetic of souls can spread like wildfire when put to an infectious melody and a sick beat.

I have so many songs that have no business on a party playlist on my party playlist. Kendrick Lamar is skewering systemic racism and lazy narratives, and I’m bopping my head to it holding a beer at a pool party — an exemplar of his disappointment.

But like Springsteen’s intent, and Hutchison, and Lamar, and countless other astonishing musicians, their songs may be playing at parties or soundtracking spin classes, but the message sticks if you’ll let it. It’s out there forever. There’s hearing, and then there’s listening. There’s reacting, and then there’s feeling. The music I return to goes in that order.

And that’s why this morning, I returned to The Midnight Organ Fight. I didn’t want to put it on. I wanted to listen to it. I wanted to feel it. People close to me know I have a shit time with my mental health. It plagues my life in very real ways and protected itself with shame and judgment I’ve turned into a default setting. It has cost me an incredible amount of time. That’s what hurts the most.

My tagline for Half Chicken is “vulnerability served shamelessly.” I’ve spent the last few years learning how full of shit I am about this. I am terrified of vulnerability and full of shame. I thought of vulnerability as simply being okay with making fun of myself. What a childish understanding of that word.

All I knew how to do was take my shame and judgment and turn it into jokes. I’m afraid that’s still all I know how to do. The only times I have found success being vulnerable are in therapy when I am forced to be mindful (if you can go to therapy, go to therapy) and when I listen to music. To let myself feel it. It’s the fastest way for me to be confronted with what it means to live and alert me to the ways in which I don’t.

The joke I want to tell is in newspaper headline format: “Sad white boy uses music to soundtrack self-loathing; makes argument that music is cool.” Eh, not bad. But sincerely, I sit with music to be present with the reality that I’m not doing well. It makes me face that better than a joke or men’s usual approach: denial and reframing struggle into some invented adversary we must conquer with our fists and dicks.

No, I’d rather use that beautiful juxtaposition of listening to a message that is relatable over a melody that kicks ass. My contemplation of these things is probably the strongest thing I do.

Music or otherwise, it’s in the listening and the feeling that I can empathize with someone I can’t inherently relate to or something I always misunderstood, especially within myself. And it makes it okay to just be in that, without admission or defense — it just is. And when it just is, you feel it like you never have before.   

It’s what makes it okay to be angry that we turn our backs on our Veterans…and blast “Born in the USA” while I tool out for America in a stars-and-stripes tank top on the 4^th of July. It’s what makes me get hyped to workout to “m.A.A.d city”…and think about how it ain’t bootstraps for why talented, wonderful kids struggle to make it out of bad circumstances. It’s what makes me skip a MUNA song when their anthems pulsate too much for my taste…and realize how much those three bad asses empower kids in the LGBTQ+ community. It’s what makes me play Touché Amoré for an adrenaline rush…and feel for the lead vocalist who is screaming about how he’ll try to find God again because it was his mother’s dying wish before she succumbed to her cancer.

And it’s what makes me ramp up when Hutchison stomps the pedal and croons “Is that you in front of me, coming back for even more of exactly the same”…and be so incredibly thankful for my family’s irrational love and support.

Can you believe there’s a faction of people thinking it’s okay to ignore art? To devalue it? To ban it? To simulate it? No, this is not political. It’s only dumb.

Let me get this straight, so there are people out there who claim they want to help restore or elevate humanity, and their plan is to deny or automate the human condition? Got it.

This is my first blog post since 2019. And I have failed to give you what I usually excel at: dad humor without being a dad. Sorry to disappoint. I am, however, still on brand, in that I wrote 1,300 words about something I made perfectly clear in the first 200.

But I guess if you really listen for it, this is me asking people to pay attention to what your friends and family are listening to, or watching, or reading, and showing interest in it. It might reveal a feeling a lot of us struggle to articulate or understand. The things starving our brains. What we’re trying to erase, we just don’t have the proper tools.

We’re all masochists for people we love. I think that makes for a hell of a song.