The missing parts of Christian Lee Hutson

In it, Baldwin spoke to documentary filmmakers about his brother’s writing process, particularly during the infamous period of writers’ block he experienced while trying to finish Another Country. “There were times, for instance,” David said, “when he’d come in and say: ‘This person is not speaking to me today. I don’t know what’s the matter with them.’”

Sifting through both James’ own interviews and other accounts from his close confidants, one is able to pick up a pattern of speech whereby he discusses the characters of his books and stories as if he were speaking about friends. He might explain, for example, what David of Giovanni’s Room had gotten up to in Paris on any given day. Or, he might disclose what New York jazz bar Rufus of Another Country had stumbled out of on any given night. Baldwin’s characters were as real to him as anyone standing in front of him, as tangible and consequential anything going on in the physical world around him.

Folk singer-songwriter Christian Lee Hutson talks about his songs and their speakers this same way. If he offers up an insight on one lyric or another, he’ll tell me what the character had been “going through” at the time the line came to him, not the experience he himself had been having. Though we might be at the height of the diaristic songwriting boom, Hutson seems to feel that writing little autobiographies over and over in his songs seems a waste and a cop out. Rather, he strives for more as a writer, turning his gaze outward and putting the world under his pen.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Hutson’s first dream was to be a novelist. “I was an old man as a child,” he says jokingly. “My parents asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up and I was like: ‘I would like to write novels and short fiction.’” For a long time, music was only his secondary love.

Hutson may not have ended up churning out books for a living, but he still ended up a writer. Though a songwriter by technical trade, to listen to a Christian Lee Hutson song feels more akin to reading an Alice Munro short story than listening to a piece of contemporary music. Each track manages to pull off a full narrative arc in a matter of minutes, but still fills in those broad strokes with details so sharp they feel straight out of a Wes Anderson film. And though the singer-songwriter-folksy thing has become popular in the last decade — particularly in the last five years — not many are doing it quite like this.

When we talk, Hutson is sitting on his porch in Atlanta trying to light a cigarette. He’s been living there on and off, splitting his time between the South and New York. A one-time fixture of the L.A. scene, he’s stretching his wings again. Everything is grown out and green behind him, lush trees and shrubs rustle in a light Southern wind, and Hutson sports a grown-out beard to match. It’s the height of a long, hot summer, but Hutson is clearly relaxed. Approaching the release of his excellent third album, Paradise Pop 10., he’s not in any kind of rush. After a series of prolific years, he’s got nothing to prove to anyone — other than himself.

Like he claims to have been as a child, Hutson still feels wise for his 33 years. Maybe it’s the beard and the cigarette and the way he can quote Adrienne Rich essays offhand - but it’s also the maturity so evident in his songwriting, the poise with which he speaks, the way both in conversation and in art each word feels so purposeful that you can’t help but listen.

Hutson’s musical journey began with a gifted guitar and a simple observation about chord structures in popular music. “My parents got me a guitar when I was 12, right at the time when the biggest things in the world were pop punk,” he says. “It was all pretty approachable music. The night that I first got the guitar, I learned how to play a blink-182 song and it was like, ‘Whoa, this is awesome.’ I could just play this song that I listened to on the radio.”

“By the time I was 13 years old, I was like, ‘I don’t know if I could be a novelist now, but I like music,’” he continues. “Somebody showed me Bob Dylan, and then Joni Mitchell, and then Elliott Smith, and those things just made me realise that I could – with just the same three chords – write whatever I wanted to.” Songwriting, then, was a pursuit that came less for Hutson as one of those “my parents played The Beatles around the house, so I just had to do it too" type of dreams (though that played a part) and rather as, in his words, “a good way to tell a short story.”

But as he became engrossed in writing and playing, school took a backseat. Shortly thereafter, he dropped out: “I kind of got drunk on the delusional self-hype or whatever,” he says of his decision. At this point, he’s snickering at himself — retroactive self-deprecation. I can’t help but get the sense he has a simultaneous case of sober second thoughts and a rightful admiration towards the gall of his younger self. His mother — who he’d spent most of his childhood with — was aghast: “On my mom’s side of things, they were like: ‘You have to finish school, are you fucking crazy?’” he recounts. His father was a different story.

“My biological dad was just a person who believed in following your passions no matter what,” he explains. “And also, he was a pretty anti-establishment person, so he didn’t have a great reverence for school in general. I let that be the voice of reason that took over.”

Hutson’s mind was made up. His first move was to begin playing in what he describes as a “Tom Waits kind of band.” He joined the group in high school, though most of its members were about a decade older than he was. He spent his days roaming around with them, learning the life of professional musicianship.

As his creative life came into focus, Hutson's personal life changed in lockstep. After getting his father’s blessing to strike out on his own, the two began to spend more and more time together, catching up on lost time. “I didn’t get to spend a lot of my childhood with him, so my teen years were kind of like learning the myth of his life, being really into what he was into what he liked,” he explains. What that meant in practice was getting really into country music.

His artistic path ended up being opportune. Folk music has had an international resurgence, with virtually every megastar clamouring to release country records. Hutson is aware of this trend — even appreciative of it — though he promises his style wasn’t intentionally contrived. With the state of the world these days, turning to folk — both himself and others — felt natural. “Maybe we’re in an era of people gravitating towards things that are accomplishable, direct and aren’t trying to trick you or be so complex,” he says.

But despite borrowing from compositional and aesthetic folk conventions, Hutson’s brand of Americana is still subversive at every turn. In many cases, he’s able to take what might at first glance appear to be traditional country fodder and turn it on his head, juxtaposing the tradition he studied and inherited with the modern realities he’s lived. On “Skeleton Crew” from Paradise Pop. 10, for example, he sets his stage at a suburban pickup baseball league, but he centres his gaze on two dads who meet each week at games and are quietly in love with one another. Flitting from their postgame moments drinking in the parking lot to the protagonist’s own home where he’s fixing a crib for his new baby, Hutson interrogates a period of time – a period that still exists in many regions of the country – when embracing or acting on one’s full identity feels more like a lukewarm trade off than an act of self-love and liberation. The storyline is so subtle that you might miss it, but it’s undeniably there.

This kind of writing is where the cutting edge of folk lies, and it’s the kind of writing Hutson is most interested in. Using a light touch, he spins microscopic vignettes into broader interrogations of America. His work feels, in a way, like the second coming of Henry Nilsson, infused with that same hokeyness that makes each line feel poignant and tragicomic at the same time.

Maybe, to take the reference a step further, one often even hears in the protagonists of Hutson’s songs a litany of modern Joe Bucks, all on their own quests to make it big but being torn between the two poles of American culture in the process. In these quirky subversions, Hutson is able to reclaim and reinvent the folk culture he fell in love with as a teenager. In his hands, for example, a school in a small town can quickly become a cheeky callout on the contradictions youth political culture, as on 2020 track “Northsiders”: “We were so pretentious then / Didn’t trust the government / Said that we were communists / And thought that we invented it.”

“There’s something for a lot of America where, when you hear a banjo come in, that means a sign of danger,” he says. “We can’t all disown the parts of our identity that inherently take us back to drinking out of a solo cup or whatever pop country is now. I mean, I grew up on that … The repurposing of it by young punk kids now is a reminder that you can take back some of that palette.”

“It’s inspiring especially because the choices are either to shy away from it and not use it or co-opt the tools of what you have oppressed by and also are nostalgic for and turn it into something that reflects your life,” he continues.

Of course, these are learnings that took years to sink in for Hutson. In those first few months out of school, his focus was mainly on the group he’d been part of, and he pursued his own writing on the side. Eventually, he got restless again and ran towards what he’d shied away from. He applied to a music program in California, though he only stayed for a year before dropping out yet again. “At this point, something I loved to do was drop out of school,” Hutson jokes. In his program, he met a classmate who shared his folksy inclinations. They decided to start a band with another friend, using Facebook to book shows. He stayed with that group for a few years, learning how to tour the DIY way.

“It’s so different from tour as I understand it now,” he says of his experience. “It was kind of just like: see if any business will allow you to play music in their establishment in whatever town, and if you can make gas money and enough money to stay at a motel, then you have succeeded and you’re a professional musician.”

This was how Hutson spent his twenties, dedicating years to being on the road doing DIY touring, burning CDs of his own records, and just “going around trying to figure out how I could make more of a living than to not actually have a place anywhere and to have to be hustling wine bar owners to get a three-hour slot for instrumental music, or something.” As time passed, he grew disgruntled. Wishful, youthful thinking became adult pessimism and malaise.

“I had a pretty serious moment where I was like: ‘I think I’m gonna give up on playing music’,” he confesses. After stints in Nashville, Cincinnati, and New York, he returned home to L.A., got a job and, quite simply, looked for “other shit to do.” As part of his homecoming, Hutson reconnected with a few musician friends. They’d ask him to come around and join a session. He’d often oblige, buying back into the idea of being a professional recording artist again. Some of those sessions became the early seeds of his ANTI- label debut (and third solo album) Beginners, though this wouldn’t materialise until years later. For the time being, Hutson had found himself stuck in an endless loop. He’d go into a session with no expectations, get excited about a track, think he might just try again, talk himself off the ledge shortly thereafter, and repeat the cycle again.

Five years went by between the start of his sessions and the release of Beginners in 2020. The record itself went through four iterations, the first three of them almost reaching the finish line but never feeling quite right. The time spent labouring over the record might, on the one hand, hint at a streak of creative genius. True, Hutson’s attention to detail — background strings, electronic vocoder background dubs, little synth flourishes so quiet they might just fade away — is impressive. But there was more at play. “I’m a fairly passive person,” he admits. “I went through several rounds of different people being excited to help me make my record and then me not knowing if it was the right mood for it.”

Part of the difficulty was also the natural risk of working with too many collaborators. While Hutson might have had his own vision for a track, the producers who pitched him their services often did so by proclaiming that they knew better and could “fix” his sound

The creative block only broke when he met Phoebe Bridgers. He had been in one of his out-phases, put off by the idea of recording and content with making his way as a hired gun tour musician. It had been going pretty well, too, and he’d earned a spot with Jenny Lewis and her band. But meeting Bridgers changed the game.

“I felt so understood," he tells me. "We had the same musical vocabulary. It was easy to just go into the room and do the bits based more or less on how I actually sound in a room. Everyone else I worked with up until that pint was like: ‘Yeah, you’re pretty good, but you’re not good enough. We’ve gotta figure out some kind of way that you’re not too weird,’” he says. “Phoebe was the first person that made me feel like I didn’t have to do anything other than go into the room and play the song.”

It was the beginning of a longstanding creative partnership and friendship. Cutting a record with Bridgers was — and still is — as simple as hanging out with a confidant: they’d stay up for hours just talking about their own lives, making little jokes, mulling over turns of phrases. The songs then, more often than not, wrote themselves.

Part of what Bridgers brought to Hutson’s work was a critical ear that he trusted. Another keen lyricist, Hutson knew he could rely on her to refine the little details that peppered his songs and elevate him as songwriter.

In recent years, there has been a trend in acoustic writing that leans towards the hyper-specific, the assumption seeming to be that the more niche the reference you can make work, the more authentic the writing. But if those references aren’t strung together by a stronger undercurrent — as many often are not — the effect comes off as a veneer. Hutson doesn’t have this problem: he’s one of the few able to stick the landing. Writing a song is the same as building a world and a mood; as much as anything, it’s a character exercise.

“Usually I’ll have a melody or music first and then like one lyric that is rattling around my brain and then try to fill in around it and find out who the character is that is saying that,” he explains. “’After hours era Catherine O’Hara’ was in my head for a solid year where I was like, who is saying that? What are you? What are you talking about? I will slowly work out from there.”

To finish a song means Hutson has to step inside his character and let them take him over. “I just have to listen to whatever they are feeling and find other things that feel like that. If I’m lucky, sometimes a narrative will emerge,” he explains of the process. “And then I also have, like, a hundred half songs that have the same thing but I’m like, ‘I don’t know who this is, that person hasn’t talked to me enough.’”

Character building, he admits, is sometimes easier and more engaging for him than the alternative. Usually, he’ll try to lift experiences that run closely parallel to his life without dipping explicitly into his own lane. That might mean pulling from a friend or a TV show character. “I just try and get it a little bit further away from me,” he says, “because I imagine singing it on stage and feeling like it’s hard to get invested in my own story every night. It's easier to get invested in the lives of made-up characters because they’re constantly struggling with the thing. And if I’m writing about something that happened ten years ago, I’m usually like, ‘Well, yeah, that’s over.’"

“It’s a really funny thing to write things, because you write things and then they mean something at the time and then they start to mean different things. It teaches you about life,” he goes on.

If anything, maybe part of why Hutson feels so fresh — even while still lifting from convention — is because it’s just nice to finally listen to someone who seems as interested in observing the world around them as they do talking about themselves.

“I think of Christian as a songwriter who really, really, really loves songwriting and solving the little puzzles that come up as you try to make a record,” collaborator and fellow singer-songwriter Katy Kirby tells me. The pair hit it off long ago as mutual admirers and Internet friends, though they only started their working relationship after the release of Beginners. “I also think he’s at his best when he’s having fun or giving himself permission to try risky weird stuff.”

This keen eye was indeed what critics and audiences most connected with on Beginners. Though he had been self-releasing on the road for years, the record was still something of a debut for Hutson. For one thing, it was his first record with ANTI-, the label he remains with today. And, even now, Hutson’s streaming pages display Beginners as his earliest available album. To his audience, that record was the start of Hutson’s trajectory as we know it today. At the time, though, it didn’t necessarily feel that way to him.

The pandemic had hit the world just months before Beginners hit streaming, even after he had already spent years working on the project. “I had no concept that many people had even heard it until I was able to go and play shows,” he says. “It felt like it just came out in a vacuum, and I released something that felt like a nice, buttoned-up statement of the record thing I’d always wanted to make. The only thing that had changed was I had a record deal, so I had the opportunity to make another one.”

Building on the successes of Beginners, Hutson continued to expand on his conceptual universe. He saw that record as a meditation on adolescence, and he complimented it with 2022’s Quitters, which moves to examine the adult perspective.

On Paradise Pop. 10, released this week, Hutson keeps the energy going. Familiar scenes and characters return. The character who wrote Quitters’ “Age Difference,” for example, has a reprise on Paradise Pop. 10’s “Carousel Horses.” If Beginners was, well, about beginnings and Quitters was its foil, Paradise Pop. 10 comes in as an omniscient third in the trilogy, focusing as much on the psychological journeys of its characters as any one end state or another.

The album takes its name from a town in Parke County, Indiana, near where Hutson went to visit his father during childhood. Its cover is a mosaic of an airplane window. But these hallmarks were less about Hutson leaning into nostalgia and escapism and more about catching himself in the present and embracing himself fully. “This record feels a little bit more immediate to me than those other two records which felt really nostalgic, really digging into the past. And this record, to me, felt like actively trying to write about and remind myself to stay in the present,” he explains. “Those records felt like they’re about working something out and trying to come to terms with things. This one feels a little bit different, only in that it feels more like trying to remind yourself to live your life and participate in what is happening now. I feel like I’m somebody that has missed parts of my life trying to figure out the part before them.”

By grounding itself in the present, Paradise Pop. 10 inevitably also rubs up against restlessness and unknowns. “What I notice when I listen back to it now is the theme of people waiting to start their lives,” Hutson explains. “Phoebe and I have this joke that we use with each other a lot which is that, ‘I can’t wait to remember this as good’ … You have a lot of people unsure about their future and unsure about their present and characters that are directly in the moment when their life is about to change.”

From this, the significance of the plane window immediately becomes apparent: Strap in, it’s the ride of your life! Indeed, it’s an album of people in flux and constant motion, whether in their own lives or in their relationships. On songs like “Tiger” and “Flamingos,” characters engage in a constant push-pull of finding their own worth as they bounce from place to place, looking for solid ground. “This is where it all begins / You got your lucky break / I will always be the one / That got out of your way,” sings the protagonist on the former, who followed his lover across the country just to turn around and go him when confronted with her successes.

“The connective tissue between those songs is people that are having trouble finding themselves in their own lives, which might be the most autobiographical theme that I connect to the most in my life,” Hutson reflects.

By this point in our conversation, the sun has started to set behind him. An hour has passed in what feels like minutes. He treats himself to another cigarette, takes a moment to breathe in slowly, and then he picks up again where he left off. “It’s like my Midwestern surfing accent,” he says, a reference to his jumbled, cross-country childhood spent bouncing between the Midwest and L.A. “I constantly feel like I exist between many different worlds and I’m somehow a part of many different worlds and so I’m also a part of none of them.”

Toeing that line is what allows Hutson to play with those dicohtomies of tradition and modernity, city and country, Americana and punk, tragedy and comedy, and self-awareness and total unconsciousness that give his songs texture.

As of late, Hutson has been finding himself on new terrain once again. After a long stint in L.A. which lasted from his pre-Beginners days up to after the release of Quitters, Hutson made the move back east to New York. For him, it was a mid-life fresh start. “I’m definitely out of L.A., which feels really nice,” Hutson says. “It just became like every part of the city – because I lived there so old – existed as a weird, nostalgic mindset.” Streets weren’t just places to pass through but spots he’d smoked with old friends and lovers; bowling alleys weren’t just places to hang out but reminders of childhood — some welcome, some not. “It’s nice to be in new places where my frame of reference is very immediate, and I’m not thrown into a time warp by standing on a corner or something. It’s nice to be in place that reminds me of who I am today,” he says.

Shortly after Hutson landed in New York, the making of Paradise Pop. 10 began. “It was my favourite recording experience I’ve ever had,” Hutson says of the process. It was like New York was one big college town. The studio was the lecture hall, apartments were like dorms to hang out in after class, his collaborators a tight-knight circle of friends. After living in L.A. for so long — the land of perpetual driving and perpetual traffic — even the simple pleasure of being able to walk to the studio every single day was transformative. “I would walk to the studio with Phoebe or Maya or Marshall or somebody and just talk about the night before, what had happened the day before, and get the creative juices flowing,” he explained.

Indeed, in addition to his own storied repertoire, much of Christian Lee Hutson’s mystique is also wrapped up in the cast of characters he surrounds himself with. Players like Phoebe Bridgers, Maya Hawke, Samia Finnerty, Katy Kirby, Marshall Vore and more circle his creative orbit, and he theirs.

Collectives of artists working in tandem have defined many of music’s most iconic eras. Scenes that circulated around CBGB’s in New York, the Chelsea Hotel, the East Coast / West Coast rap circles, and even that group of indie artists that are, at present, attached to Jack Antonoff by the hip have dominated the conversations around genres and periods. There’s an argument to be made that this same thing is becoming true about Hutson’s circle too, though when I probe him, he swears it’s nothing more intentional than the fact that they’re all just really good friends.

In Kirby’s mind, the reason Paradise Pop. 10 came to life the way it did was because of that collegial atmosphere amongst its contributors. Her contribution to the record came about casually. All it took was a phone call from Hutson asking if she was in town and available to play; the answer was an easy yes. “Christian does have a way of bringing people together to work that makes it very easy to forget that work is technically being done—sort of a non-fussy, low pressure collaborative energy that tends to bring out the best in everyone,” she tells me. “This is 100% my favorite record of his, truly from the bottom of my heart I mean that. I truly believe it’s his best.”

The magic of Paradise Pop. 10 then, was that same magic Hutson found when he first started working with Phoebe Bridgers on Beginners all those years ago. “If I can get Phoebe and Marshall and Samia and Maya to laugh or like the song, then the job is done,” Hutson says. “I’ve met people that do these pop writing things where I’m just like, fuck, it sounds so broad. When the audience is everyone in the whole world, what choices do you make? It’s nice when it only has to be funneled to please one person and make them laugh at. It gives you confidence in the thing you’re making before you have to think about whether or not someone on the Internet thinks it sucks.”

As he breezes towards the release of Paradise Pop. 10, Hutson is taking comfort in being comfortable. “I’m in a hopeful place where I feel…. Not like things are scarce,” he admits. This record, he acknowledges, is undoubtedly more personal than his others. For a writer who has always specialised in the world of made-up characters, it’s new terrain. “To make something so personal to me, even though there are still characters, makes me feel more connected to it and a little bit more like the possibilities are endless instead of finite,” he says. If he has a next great character study to perform, it’s his own, and he’s ready.