Coiled for the spring,
Caught like a creature in the headlights
Into a desperate panic, or a tempest of blind fury—
Like a cornered beast, or a conquering hero.

We’ve come to the bonus song in the “Fear” trilogy. I’m covering these songs in order of where they appear in the trilogy. Part 4, “Freeze,” was the fourth song to be written and released.

I’m not sure what possessed the guys to write a fourth part to a trilogy that had already been completed, but “Freeze” is fantastic, if a bit unnecessary on a conceptual level.

Lyrically, it delves into the ‘fight or flight or freeze’ instinct. This was previously covered in “The Enemy Within,” but this song really drills down on the ‘freeze’ response. It’s an attempt to capture that feeling of having a panic attack in musical form: The DUH DUH-beat-DUH-DUH guitar work is designed to make your heart race, while the screaming, wordless vocalizations at the end sound panicked and terrified.

When I was pregnant, I used to get horrific panic attacks on a nearly nightly basis. (Hormones, y’all. Ugh.) While their frequency eased substantially after I gave birth, I’ve never quite shaken them, and some things that used to fill me with only mild dread – jellyfish, swarms of bugs – can now lead to a pretty crippling episode. “Freeze” feels just like the static in my heart—I can’t listen to it very often.

To be honest, it breaks my heart that this song appears on Vapor Trails, an album about the many ways grief breaks us apart. Peart suffered panic attacks for most of his life, but how much worse must they have been in those awful days after his family passed. The poor guy.