Legacies

Scott Hutchinson of Frightened Rabbit committed suicide last week. He was always very open about his struggles in his music and I’ll always be grateful I saw him in concert.

I’m listening to my favourite songs, however, and they are inevitably changed by this context. His powerful and recurring use of bridge metaphors, for example, is changed after his jumping from one as the means of taking his life. They’re not deeper now, but somehow corrupted in my eyes. It’s no longer the voice someone I admire for facing our common demons but someone whose example I fear.

This is exactly why I took suicide off the table a few years ago. No matter how little love I may feel for myself in a given moment, I always hold my music sacrosanct. Sylvia Plath has been reduced to “that poet who killed herself”, and I refuse to allow the same to happen to my own legacy.

The thoughts are still there, but I promise I’ll never let them win. If not for my sake, or for yours, then for the sake of my musical children.