81. Frightened Rabbit – “Woke Up Hurting”

Sometimes a song and the listener happen to intersect at that perfect moment, when a line that might have otherwise been innocuous suddenly gains a special significance, an added weight that propels it beyond what it is, and into something else entirely. It’s a resonance of sorts, the holy ground of all art, where subjective experiences overlap and take on a life of their own, gaining a meaning or momentum that strikes the soul. This is one of those songs.

It’s not a particularly adept or even complicated track, but it does speak to common feeling, one that I feel anyone who has lived enough of life can relate to. It’s the feeling of waking up hurting, of opening your eyes and hoping for the daily tabula rasa, but instead only being greeted with a feeling of broken emptiness. It’s the throbbing pain of anxiety and insignificance. It’s being chafed by life, each minute of existence rubbing at you the wrong way, scraping at your soul until the gaping rawness of the wound no longer seems capable of healing. It’s picking at the scab of consciousness. It’s proof that you’re alive, and although its not pleasant by any means, it does carry with it a significance that often in hindsight, once beyond it, makes it all worthwhile.