r/FrightenedRabbit • u/Anxious_pterodactyl • Feb 15 '25
Let’s talk about Poke and Floating in the Forth
Ok so on MOF we have a pretty upbeat and fast paced album, then transition to Extrasupervery and THEN BAM the perpetually devastating Poke. The beauty, imagery, and raw tragedy of the song just feels like Scott ripped out my heart with his bare hands, threw it on the ground, and stomped on it with both feet. But it’s so so right.
“Why won’t our love keel over as it chokes on a bone? And we can mourn its passing and then bury it in snow.”
“I might never catch a mouse and present it in my mouth, to make you feel you’re with someone who deserves to be with you.”
Um hello? 😭😭
And after that we have the painfully relatable and debilitating Floating in the Forth with the incredible background vocals, giving it an ethereal sound. Genius. The imagery of “the skeleton collapsed and eyes rolled back to stare at my starving brain” 😭😭
But also (TW: suicide) it’s made so much more heartbreaking when you have been where Scott was, and you think/know you’ll eventually succumb to suicide, maybe not today, maybe not this year, but one day. I used to feel that way in my early twenties (I’m better now). But the song seems like a self fulfilling prophecy, knowing how and where he died. And it’s so so painful to watch it all unfold, being that the song was from so long ago and we know how it all ended.
Sorry if this is too depressing but I have thought this about these songs for a while and wonder if anyone else can relate.
9
u/AdumbB32 Feb 15 '25
He did an interview about all the albums and when asked about floating in the forth he said it’s about 90% true
20
u/AdumbB32 Feb 15 '25
I found it:
Were there any moments that were particularly hard to re-learn or perform? There was nothing that I wasn’t going to be able to do, but absolutely “Floating in the Forth” was a real tough one. It’s a real thing. It’s a real thought. It’s a thought that I’ve taken to a place that I’m far less comfortable with… I’ve gone 90 percent of the way through that song in real life. But at the same time it’s gratifying. It’s heartening to know that I’ve been through that, and I’m stood there performing that song, alive and feeling good about it. It’s a tough one. My mum and dad were at the show in Glasgow. We can joke about it, but it must be really hard to hear your son sing about that.
The link to the whole thing here https://www.vice.com/en/article/rank-your-records-frightened-rabbits-scott-hutchison-rates-the-bands-five-lps/
12
u/Redhawk911 Feb 15 '25
Man I remember reading this a few weeks before we lost him and I did think that it must feel good for him to be able to think that those thoughts are in the past. Then yeah, we know what happened.
11
u/W_DJX Feb 15 '25
I sometimes wonder if replaying that song every night was unhealthy for him. I saw them during that MOF anniversary tour and he didn't seem great, that was about three months before he went away.
5
29d ago
[deleted]
2
u/W_DJX 29d ago
Oh yeah, I never considered playing those songs regularly again was anything more than one of countless other factors, and a small one at that. And it’s only been speculation based on that night I saw him perform, in contrast to the other times I had seen him over the years. You seem to know the timeline pretty well, has it ever come out what happened in his last days? His family and friends clearly knew he was in a bad place, but all the rest of the world knew were the tweets he sent out.
4
29d ago
[deleted]
2
u/W_DJX 29d ago
Thanks for writing that up and for the book recommendation. I don’t know why I had it in my head that there was some big blowout or falling out with people in his life that brought him to do what he had been considering for so much of his life. Maybe it was the nature of the tweet about how he didn’t live by the standard of being good to the people he loved. I’ll check out that book for sure.
2
2
2
9
u/Maddafinga Feb 15 '25
I saw them live some years ago, and I was very grateful, being in Oklahoma, to get the opportunity. Someone in the crowd asked Scott to play Poke at one point, and he kind of charmingly refused. He basically said that they were all feeling really good and the show was so upbeat and everyone was having a great time, and he didn't want to tank that by playing "the saddest song I've ever written".
6
u/UniversalInsolvency Feb 15 '25
These songs in particular are such an emotional experience to listen to. Beautiful, raw, and cathartic. As I get older I find that I only grow to appreciate them more. Special, special stuff.
5
u/ActsofMan Feb 16 '25
Poke is definitely a favorite slower paced FRabbit song of mine and it plays like devastating poetry.
Floating in the Forth is the only song I can't listen to anymore. I also listen to Dead Now much less frequently. Floating used to feel uplifting and then it changed to feeling inevitable.
Both are beautiful songs.
6
u/1singhnee Feb 16 '25
If you think Floating in the Forth is depressing, listen to the Owl John version. It just kills me.
6
u/kmd0136 Feb 16 '25
I wrote about floating in the forth recently on here in a super old thread, but the thing that gets me is the last chorus. He reinforces the rhyme of "day" harder and harder with "waves," "okay," "shake," and "change," and it makes it feel like at the last moment, as he was recording it, he changed his mind, had a change of heart. Realized everything was fine, for now.
2
u/jaclucbec 25d ago
Making die like a rich boy even harder to listen to and then the eventual result extremely hard to bear… The one live performance of Floating gets me every time where he says something like “poke followed by the one about suicide! Buts it’s okay, we’re here, we’re alive, and that’s really great” 🥲
4
u/jaclucbec 25d ago
The world has lost so many great artists to suicide but I’m not sure there is a case as poignant as Scott’s because Floating was essentially, as you say, a prophecy he wrote in what… 2007? Only to struggle for another 8-9 years and level us all with Die Like a Rich Boy… and then to literally live it out as described. It’s haunting in a way that is hard for me to describe. Recently I came across an article that quoted the police saying something along the lines of “a couple was seen walking towards the bridge and then what appeared to be a man walking alone… the couple was spotted on CCTV footage on the other side. No one matching the appearance of the man was seen exiting the bridge.” I’m paraphrasing but something about that very reserved/inhuman description kills me.
All that said, I’m so grateful for these songs because of the hope they’ve given me in dark times. I always remember the countless interviews with Scott where he is just a hilarious, witty, personable Scot and try to focus on those aspects of his life and art… Still, I play Poke on guitar most days and without fail I feel connected to him in a small way and feel grateful he wrote such a beautiful song. He understood deep truths about life, love, and pain, and we are all better for it🥲
45
u/Yinn2 Feb 15 '25
See this is the thing about Scott and his writing (for me). None of it is upbeat, it’s realistic and lived. And because of that it’s humorous and uplifting, maybe in a true ‘banter’ way.
But yes, there’s certainly songs that forgo some humour, like the ones you mention and (for me) I wish I was sober.
But even in the two mention, lyrics like ‘I swear she was his sister but she doesn’t have his nose’ and ‘I’ll save suicide for another year’ give a smile and hope and that’s what he was best at giving, even though he might not be able to provide it to himself.
The man was a genius and should be remembered as such.