Winter’s always a good season for poetry and introspection. We go to sleep, wake up the next morning, and find that the world is blanketed in white and suddenly so very different from everything we knew in the past. I suppose — I know — that in many ways the Significant Breakup is like that, too.
Indeed, by our mid to late 20s we’ve all be there before, we’ve all been through The Breakup – the one breakup that defines time before and after. The world we once knew changes dramatically — friends of the former couple have to take sides; phone plans are split up; entire portions of your city have to be divided up in a plan reminiscent of Yalta (Georgetown is the equivalent of a radioactive wasteland to me now); and the swan song of the couple, of trust, of friendships, of shared books and bands and movies, and, in many respects, of the self have to be faced head-on.
Frightened Rabbit’s 2008 album, The Midnight Organ Fight, dealt with that pain and shock of the immediate breakup and destruction. The individual “armed with the past, the will, and a brick” who doesn’t necessarily want her back, but also doesn’t want to see her so happy so fast. The individual who blindly dances, drinks, and dives into the bed of others for distraction, diversion, and definition.
Some say that the amount of time it takes to get over the relationship is to divide the total length of the relationship in half, but really, who knows. At the end of the day, it takes what it takes.
But The Moving On is a whole other story, isn’t it? In a lot of respects, Frightened Rabbit’s latest album, The Winter of Mixed Drinks, is about that very story. It’s about the morning after the post-breakup binge period where one has to tackle the difficult questions, look at one’s self frankly, and make the decision. Do you move forward? Do you walk into the unknown?
I’ll be honest, I love this album. It’s about change – about the fading away of the past, about the healing of the now, and about the delicious and fearful anticipation of that which is to come. The first single released, Swim Until You Can’t See Land, asks those very questions – “Do I wait? Do I dive?…Let’s call me a baptist, call this the drowning of the past/She is there on the shoreline throwing stones at my back.”
And in the power of being able to ask those questions is the power of having control over one’s life. And in having control, one can act; to continue with the oceanic metaphor, one can dive. Indeed, one of the lingering questions throughout the entire album is the question of whether the listener is a man or a bag of sand.
Where do you stand? More importantly, what do you do?
Which ties in with the parallel metaphor of death – You’ll hear references to graves, to white pine boxes, to digging, and to bones. But what is change but the death of the past? If we dive we inexorably leave the shore behind us, if we move forward we inevitably turn our back to the past.
If I can’t shake myself, I can’t dance with you.
And when it comes to this album, that’s the entire point.
Well this is easier now
I’ve found all the pieces that I lost in the flood
And it wasn’t that much.
It’s about picking up the pieces, weighing them, understanding them, seeing it all for what it’s worth, and maybe — just maybe — diving in, moving on, and swimming until you can’t see land.
The Winter of Mixed Drinks will be released on March 9, 2010 on the FatCat Records Label, and Frightened Rabbit will be playing at DC’s very own Black Cat on April 27th.