Frightened Rabbit on Painting of a Panic Attack and Nearly Calling It Quits

Scott Hutchison needn’t have worried that living in Los Angeles would dispel his penchant for Scottish gloom. In fact, the ready availability of sunshine, sprawl and wheatgrass had the opposite effect, reinforcing Hutchison’s mournful air on Frightened Rabbit’s new album, Painting of a Panic Attack.
“I felt quite out of step,” says the singer and guitarist, who moved from Glasgow to L.A. to be with his girlfriend. “In the end, we were questioning why we were there.”
It was one of several existential questions Hutchison was asking at the time, about his life and his career. In fact, it’s no small thing that Frightened Rabbit has a new album. For a while after the Scottish band released fourth LP Pedestrian Verse in 2013, the musicians weren’t so sure there would be a fifth.
“We toured very, very hard and extensively, and at the end of it, we were physically and emotionally pretty drained,” Hutchison says. “I personally had my doubts about whether there was any need or desire to go back and continue Frightened Rabbit after that.”
Spending nearly 18 months in close quarters on a tour bus had given rise to a thicket of doubt and tension among the musicians, while fracturing lines of communication to the point where everyone needed a break. Hutchison relocated and released a solo album as Owl John in 2014, which he describes as a “palate cleanser.”
Frightened Rabbit drummer Grant Hutchison, Scott’s brother, agrees. “In hindsight, I think it ended up saving the band,” he says.
Away from the pressures of the group, the musicians reconnected as friends and decided they still wanted to make music together. “We realized how stupid it would be, really, to stop now when all the things that might have caused us to stop it were avoidable,” Grant Hutchison says. “What we get to do is brilliant, and we love it and being away from it, we missed it.”
When they reconvened to work on new music, the band—also including longtime members Billy Kennedy and Andy Monaghan, who switch among bass, guitar and keyboards, and guitarist Simon Liddell, who joined as a touring member in 2013—established a new dynamic. Scott Hutchison largely wrote the group’s first three albums (check out our video session featuring that material) himself, before inviting greater collaboration with his bandmates on Pedestrian Verse. For Painting of a Panic Attack, the musicians gathered for a month or so of working out ideas, which gave everyone an equal say in the music.
“We didn’t have to write songs, as such,” Scott Hutchison says. “I didn’t write lyrics or melodies during that time, we just wrote music, and that was kind of a leveling process.” Later, Hutchison wrote melodies and lyrics from L.A. while the rest of the band worked on music in Scotland, and they emailed song sketches back and forth.
The long-distance collaboration, and learning the software required to make it happen, crept into the sound of Painting of a Panic Attack, which has more synthetic elements than on previous Frightened Rabbit albums: the electronic drums on “Get Out,” for example, or the moody, atmospheric keyboards on “An Otherwise Disappointing Life.”
“We didn’t make Kid A, but it’s got new sounds, and that’s essential for a band at our stage to remain relevant, at least to the five people involved with it,” Hutchison says.