Scott Hutchinson, singer songwriter, founder of the band, Frightened Rabbit, died earlier this month.
I didn’t know him, nor the band’s music well, so I decided to listen some. I came away feeling a familiar sadness, as I often have, after an artistic soul of uncommon depth leaves this earth all too early, from tragic events, and worst of all, from apparent suicide.
The world is dense with throngs of humanity that deliberately choose paths of danger, conflict, warfare, and high risk behavior. Their deaths hurt people left behind, but those outcomes are part of a calculation they made willingly, knowingly playing the odds.
Then, there are people like Scott Hutchinson, and those like him, who have a calling to create music, art, dance, and deeper voices, to share with the rest of us, while they wrestle inside of themselves to find meaning. They die too soon, and too tragically, of struggle they can never quite calculate.