You wouldn’t know it by the way the Scottish songwriter offers up his heart for all to see as part of the epic-sounding Frightened Rabbit. Or by the way in which the unassuming frontman hops from interview to interview throughout a seemingly endless routine of press for his band’s second LP, The Midnight Organ Fight, despite it being released in April of last year. But Scott Hutchinson, the band’s lyricist and primary Rabbit, actually is quite shy. If he weren’t, said the performer’s brother and Frightened Rabbit drummer Grant Hutchinson, their mother never would have given Scott the nickname that would later serve as their band’s namesake.

And who would know this better than Scott Hutchinson’s younger sibling and bandmate? Maybe the vocalist’s ex, the woman whose breakup with the Frightened Rabbit singer was the catalyst for Midnight Organ Fight’s 14 soul-baring tracks. The quartet’s latest full-length is a wretched tale of broken-hearted misery as the elder Hutchinson documented every tragic contemplation, every teardrop shed, and all the sleepless nights that followed his relationship’s end. Compiling his despair into an almost 50-minute collection of broad sweeping tales, the group offered up a much-needed sense of grandiose purpose to the woe-is-me tradition of breakup songs.

“It was his therapy. That was how he felt at that short period of time,” said Grant Hutchinson of his brother’s painfully-exposed words. “I don’t think we’re going to be pigeonholed just yet. We won’t always be ‘that breakup band’.” In fact, Frightened Rabbit is set to begin work on its third full-length in the coming months. The album will be the Scots’ fourth output for Fat Cat Records in less than three years, a period that began with Sing the Greys and also included Liver! Lung! FR! — a live acoustic performance of The Midnight Organ Fight that was released a few months after its studio counterpart. But the centerpiece of their catalog remains Organ, an album whose acclaim is just now starting to roll in.

“We’re quite happy to see the album popping up on a lot of [Best of 2008] lists,” Grant Hutchinson said. “Anyone who says they don’t care what people think of their music is lying. Why else do you make music? Sure, it’s for you, but you also want people to appreciate what you do and say that they enjoy it. You do everything you can to stay true to what music you want to make, but you also try hard to make sure people like it.”

So almost a year ago — when the band set out to hone the record that would come to define its 2008 — the brothers sought a high-profile producer to help provide the anthemic soundscapes that they knew their record deserved. Having already helped expand Interpol’s music from mere post-punk revival into vast, haunting, arena-ready rock, producer Peter Katis seemed the logical fit. Thus, the 4-piece ensemble that had started out as Scott Hutchinson’s solo art-house project headed to Connecticut to work with the man behind acclaimed albums such as The National’s Boxer.

It was a move that paid dividends, as the 14-hour workdays turned into an exorcism of sorts for Scott Hutchinson. As the singer vented the frustrations of a love turned sour, Frightened Rabbit’s folk-based compositions grew into theatric rock with sweeping melodies and a storyteller’s sense of drama. Still today, nine months after the release of The Midnight Organ Fight, audiences continue to painstakingly dissect every lyric while hanging on to every last crooning vocal. That sort of devotion is something the band’s drummer knows shouldn’t be exploited.

“We could keep playing these same songs and each time we go back to a city, have more fans. But after almost a year of singing about his breakup, Scott has moved on. It’s not fair to him — or to the fans, even more — to keep going out there each night and reliving the same old songs,” Grant Hutchinson said. “We want to change things up. We want new sounds. New stories. Scott hit a bit of a rough patch, but that album is over now.”

And it was a rough patch that (until recently) the young kid from a small town of about 6,000 people wasn’t ready to talk about. He was just too shy. Luckily for us, his music is not.

Chicago Innerview Magazine, January 2009