Owl John

Owl John served as the solo outlet for Scott Hutchison, the frontman and principal songwriter behind the Scottish indie rock band Frightened Rabbit. After Pedestrian Verse, the group’s fourth album, earned widespread praise in 2013, Hutchison began testing new creative directions ahead of work on a fifth Frightened Rabbit record, during a period when his bandmates had stepped away. He devised an ambitious timetable to finish an entire album inside two weeks, retreating first to the isolated countryside of Scotland’s Isle of Mull and later to America’s West Coast. There he was joined by Frightened Rabbit’s Andy Monaghan and Olympic Swimmers’ Simon Liddell, both of whom contributed to production and performance. Although the resulting self-titled debut carried echoes of Frightened Rabbit, it highlighted Hutchison’s songwriting abundance through a blend of atmospheric electronics and raw rock textures when it surfaced in 2014. In May 2018 Hutchison was discovered deceased near Queensferry, Scotland.