“Chloroform the singer who has nothing to say/ Stare in wonder as the masses sing along anyway,” Scott Hutchison sang on Songs About Roses, a track from the solo album he released in 2014. As bare-boned as anything he wrote, it skewered false gods and those who deified them while flaying himself for not living up to his own exacting standards. Hutchison, who has taken his own life aged 36, made a life’s work of processing his feelings into emotionally raw folk-rock songs that attracted a wide following. With his band, Frightened Rabbit, he established a niche for a global cadre of fans, many of whom identified with his struggle with depression.

Though not a household name outside their native Scotland, the group could fill 2,000-capacity venues around the UK, which boded well for the prospects of their next album. Due to be completed by the end of the year, it would have contained new themes, perhaps even a touch of optimism. Hutchison, the band’s singer and lyricist, told the NME in March: “I’m trying to find different things ’cause it’s album six, and I can’t do this all the time, you know. I don’t think anybody really gives a fuck about my relationships any more.”

There he was probably mistaken. Fans saw him as an extension of themselves, his awkwardness and vulnerability reflecting their own. His openness about romantic travails made him seem approachable – stocky, bearded and affable, he was more brotherly than starlike. Accordingly he treated fans as friends, relating to their problems, though it drained him.

Contacted by the parents of a troubled young fan who found comfort in Frightened Rabbit’s music, he responded with a handwritten note that said in part: “All I really wanted to say is that no matter how dark life seems, you are never alone. There is always hope.” After his death, many followers posted their own accounts on social media of getting through rough patches with the help of Hutchison’s songs.

The band name came from an early nickname bestowed by Hutchison’s mother. “I was incredibly shy as a child, almost chronically so,” Hutchison told Spin magazine in 2010. “So, out of that, my mum called me her frightened rabbit.” When he started to write songs in 2000, midway through a four-year illustration course at the Glasgow School of Art, he cast about for a nom de rock. Plain old “Scott Hutchison” lacked magic, he decided, but his childhood nickname would do.

His solo acoustic project expanded into a duo when his younger brother, Grant, joined on drums, and the two released their debut album, Sing the Greys, on a small Glasgow label in 2006. They eventually became a fivepiece with the addition of Billy Kennedy, Andy Monaghan and Simon Liddell.

Timidity and heightened sensitivity had accompanied Hutchison into adulthood, and informed his songwriting. Though comfortable performing in front of concert audiences, he found one-to-one conversation with strangers a trial and his songs reflected the anxiety. When romances ended, too, it hit him hard – Frightened Rabbit’s much-praised album The Midnight Organ Fight (2008) was influenced by the end of a longterm relationship, and contains some of his bleakest songs.

Its penultimate track, Floating in the Forth, recounts suicidal feelings, about which Hutchison said in an interview with Noisey a few weeks before his death: “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% of the way through that song in real life.” But he was in a better frame of mind now, he added. “It’s heartening to know that I’ve been through that, and I’m [still] performing that song, alive and feeling good about it.”

Born in Selkirk, in the Scottish Borders, the second of Marion and Ron Hutchison’s three sons, he was close to his brothers Neil and Grant, the latter of whom described himself as the “Tasmanian devil” to Scott’s “frightened rabbit”. Scott moved the 80 or so miles to Glasgow to study illustration, but was more interested in music than art (he later used his skills to design artwork for Frightened Rabbit’s albums).

His first songs were influenced by Ryan Adams and similar Americana artists, but when Grant became a member, they joined a long tradition of jittery indie-guitar acts who couldn’t have been anything but Scottish. His heritage mattered to him – “I think anthemic-misery-indie is … Scotland’s greatest export,” he remarked in 2014, and he did his bit by singing in his own accent.

Their second album, The Midnight Organ Fight, broke them in the US and to a lesser extent the UK. Hutchison’s mercilessly honest lyrics (“Vital parts fall from his system and dissolve in Scottish rain,” ran The Modern Leper) were lauded as poetry; such was the demand from the US that they toured there more than a dozen times. It must have been gruelling for Hutchison, who was afraid of flying.

Three more albums followed, with attendant promotional and touring obligations; Hutchison also put out a solo LP under the name Owl John, and participated, with members of Editors and Minor Victories, in an “indie supergroup”, Mastersystem, who released their sole album last month.

Hutchison’s parents and brothers survive him.

• Scott Hutchison, singer and songwriter, born 20 November 1981; found dead 10 May 2018