Christian Lee Hutson Begins Again

There’s a song called “Fountain of Sorrow” that came out in 1974. Jackson Browne wrote it not even two years after his debut single, “Doctor, My Eyes,” reached #8 on the Hot 100. I return to Jackson’s words on the former often, as he has a certain grace for shrinking the distance between any two people. “Fountain of Sorrow” is the story about a photograph full of paragraphs, as Browne’s narrator recognizes an old flame in one of his pictures. Maybe they’re still around, or maybe they’re long gone. “You were turning around to see who was behind you, and I took your childish laughter by surprise,” he sings. “And at the moment that my camera happened to find you, there was just a trace of sorrow in your eyes.” On a song like “Single for the Summer,” Christian Lee Hutson conjures a similar kind of marriage, as he casts images of departed lovers bound now only by the affections they’ve shared between themselves and strangers. A narrator shows a picture of their sweetheart to whomever sits beside them on a flight to God knows where; 40-ouncers get guzzled down on sun-beaten roofs; hands go beneath shirts, clammy skin and all. “I told you I was dying then,” Hutson spells out for the rest of us. “It was technically the truth.” You could care less if it wasn’t.

On the cover of Hutson’s new album, Paradise Pop. 10, we are looking at the wing of an airplane through a cabin window. It’s an “eyes up” record, the artwork perhaps unintentionally calling back to that “I showed the woman next to me your picture on the plane” line he wrote four years ago. Flying can be an anxious expense, existing as both uncertain and new. It can be a freeing act, too. The sky beyond the wing is made of stained glass, and the blue in stained glass windows so often is meant to symbolize paradise.

The final line of Paradise Pop. 10 is a certain one. “Everything is different now,” Hutson declares with a kind of hope that isn’t didactic. Planes come up a lot in his writing; the first words of “Atheist” detail a descent into Chicago and eyes casing the city for a childhood home. Time zones flip-flop, seasons change over the course of a turbulent afternoon, adventures turn bi-coastal. In Christian Lee Hutson’s world, there is never a shortage of beginnings. “You get to [begin] a lot, I think, in life,” he contends. “You get to do it every day.” He pauses to consider his next move. “My girlfriend and I joke all the time about how the most comfortable place for both of us, in life, is to be on an airplane. Nothing else can happen, you’re on pause. You have reflective time where you’re not engaging with the world.”

Hutson flew a lot as a child, because his parents were divorced and living on opposite coasts (“I was raised over the phone” hits harder with context). Spending hours upon hours on planes became a comfortable way to travel until it wasn’t. “I would get really anxious about when I was going to see my dad again and really worried about 9/11,” he says. “I was scared that the world was ending; I thought the rapture was going to happen all the time. I was a really anxious Christian kid who was like, ‘We’re all going to go to Hell and the world’s going to end soon!’”

After breaking down and talking to his mom, she offered him a phrase of comfort that’s stuck with him ever since: “You get to begin again tomorrow.” “Every time the day starts over, you have an opportunity to be the better version of yourself that you were trying to be that you failed to be yesterday,” he continues. “Life does continue, and you don’t have to be anxious that you can’t see your dad. It’s something that I’ve been able to keep in my life for a long time, now matter how awful today is—where everything went fucking wrong and the world is on fire. When I wake up, the beginning of the day always feels like a nice, clean slate to me.”

He pauses again. “We’re not professionals at being human beings. It’s freeing to allow yourself to be a person who is learning about, no matter how old you get, what it means to be alive and to learn to love yourself and to learn to love other people. I think it’s nice to know that you don’t ever become an expert.”

Maybe you believe everything happens for a reason, or maybe you don’t care much at all when life unravels in unique and unexplainable ways. What side you take isn’t for me to judge. But, Christian Lee Hutson’s music fell into my lap during the pandemic, no doubt a product of Phoebe Bridgers, Meg Duffy, Lucy Dacus and Conor Oberst all appearing in the choir on “Get the Old Band Back Together.” I loved “Seven Lakes” and “Talk,” but I was most drawn to the Beginners cover, a collage made by Adam Sniezek depicting a gaggle of kids riding their Schwinn bikes around a dorky-looking police office. In the foreground is a utopian slab of pavement; in the background are hills in all shades of green and farmhouses pressing against autumn-colored trees. The reds pop, as do the teals. A cradle of sunflowers and tulips reach out at the children like protective hands. It all feels merry and promising. You can build a life in there. You can be new in town but still have it all figured out.

I was overjoyed to learn that Hutson wrote his first two albums, The Hell With It and Yeah Okay, I Know, in Ohio. His Beginners song “Northsiders” came to life here, too, and it’s where his dad currently resides, in a town near the state’s southwestern edge (a town that makes an appearance in “Tiger” on Paradise Pop. 10, as well). “I wrote really easily there because I didn’t know anyone,” he says. “I would go and visit my dad. I couldn’t go out to the bar, the only thing to do was watch it snow and play piano. I’d go to the movies at nighttime alone.” Hutson’s work stood out to me because it pined for other places. Beginners and its 2022 follow-up, Quitters, are definitively (and quintessentially) Los Angeles albums, but Paradise Pop. 10 is his “leaving LA” record, as he’s since relocated to New York City. It’s a project that scales the entire country and beyond in the process, making stops in Arizona, Florida, Saint Simons Island and the Jersey Shore before escaping to the Jurassic Coast in England.

But Hutson also considers the record to have a small town built inside it, populated by characters that live in the fictional, titular paradise and question their meanings. Why was it called the Jurassic Coast? Well, because somebody “dug up an old canoe and thought it was dinosaur bones,” of course. Paradise Pop. 10 is a double-entendre in name. At first glance, it reads like one of those dollar bin compilation albums, like Paradise Pop #10. Dig deeper, however, and the title becomes “Paradise, Population: 10.” Paradise is a real, unincorporated community in Indiana not too far from the rural town Hutson’s grandmother lived in, and it became a running joke on his dad’s side of the family. “The joke is that you can finally move up to Paradise,” he says. “You can call it quits, withdraw from the world. I don’t know if that’s retirement, or something, but the joke is that, when we’ve finally had enough of the world, we go to Paradise and get our little houses up across from the cemetery.”

For Hutson, Paradise doesn’t really feel like Indiana, either, though you can imagine the origins of that “getting fat somewhere in the countryside” line in “Northsiders” came from there regardless. Paradise feels like, to him, a “place where time doesn’t exist”—where the only thing that exists is what’s right in front of you. No politics, no nothing. Just the day and you. While he chose Paradise Pop. 10 as the title because it was a phrase that lingered in his life long enough to become meaningful, what it ends up conveying for others is one of the gifts of being a writer. “You have a permanent collaborator when you have somebody listening to or reading what you’ve done, because they get to make it make sense,” Hutson says. “It’s always much more interesting to hear what other people think something is about, or what they think it means, than whatever I thought it meant at the time.”

Listening to Hutson’s music is like reading Richard Bausch’s Rare & Endangered Species, a collection of short stories existing as a small, colliding, imaginative ecosystem: a clown drives to a birthday party performance with a wedding cake from a failed marriage proposal in the backseat and beats up the child of the hour; a wife overdoses on pills after she and her husband sell their farm; a man considers cheating on his wife; a fiancèe on social security knocks up his 23-year-old wife-to-be. Every vignette flirts with itself; the venn diagram slowly shrinks into a circle. These could all be stories in Christian Lee Hutson’s world, too. In some ways, they already are. His first dream job as a kid was to become a novelist; on a song like “Rubberneckers,” swan paddle boats, country fair fun-houses and staircases to nowhere co-exist, and everyone uses them to get to the same ending; every piece fastens into the puzzle’s vacancies.

Quitters was influenced by Scott McClanahan’s 2017 novel The Sarah Book. One of Hutson’s good friends lent him a copy during the pandemic, and what struck him about McClanahan’s work was how the West Virginian never forces you to feel pity toward his characters. There’s a John Prine-like humor in the details of a protagonist who, in the throes of a divorce, a crashing bout with alcoholism and nights spent sleeping in a car in a Walmart parking lot, is as mundane as those of us who exist beyond the book. “I appreciate when people can look at life when it is really difficult and find ways to laugh through it and find it pathetic and funny,” Hutson says. “It makes things seem more manageable, to be walking into Walmart to buy a toothbrush and hope that no one catches you and knows that you’re sleeping there. That’s how I’ve always dealt with heavy emotional times in my life. As sad as things get, or as fucked as it seems like things are, there’s always a funny thing. It’s like, ‘Of course the Bird scooter’s tire popped, that’s when I knew that I was really on my worst day.’”

Hutson isn’t all that drawn to flowery, mosaic writing. It’s why he prefers writing his music in a place like Ohio, parts of this world that aren’t so picturesque. You can mistake a place like this as being Heaven, because it’s got a few Bob Evans restaurants, billboards, speed limits enforced by radar and 24-hour arcade bars in-between the state lines. And, if you pay for some of those things long enough, you can get to the pyramids. “I like magic existing in a world full of Cracker Barrels,” Hutson says. “That’s the most magical thing I can imagine, that all of it exists at once.” But, like McClanahan is with chapter-closing paragraphs, he is so good at ending his songs with perfect summations of that very same magic he covets—the fascinations that don’t exist behind a paywall. And, just like how The Sarah Book’s protagonist is named Scott McClanahan, the protagonists of Beginners, Quitters and Paradise Pop. 10 ought to be called Christian Lee Hutson. They’re all him. They’re also anyone but.

And even the furrows of Hutson’s contradictions feel precious, a truth garlanded on the album cover of Quitters—a catastrophically splendid juxtaposition of excess and misery. A man in his pajamas stands alone at the edge of a million-dollar pool, watching the water ripple while veins of houses glow in the darkened distance. A monarch butterfly sits gently on lavender, mushrooms sprout in the greenery. A streetlamp towers over cliffs while the sky rusts. Quitters was Hutson’s “isolated divorce record,” and he imagined its artwork mirroring something akin to Johnny Marco “vibing on the worst time of his life, alone” at the Chateau Marmont in Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere. “I’m not a work in progress,” Hutson stressed two years ago, as if the cymbal hits and zig-zagging guitar licks whistled like burdens through the lips of someone who’s got it all.

Last year, my friend Dan Campbell and I had a very long, winding conversation about Hutson’s “Lose This Number,” and he said something that I’ll never forget—how “Lose This Number,” and all of Beginners, is presented to us as if, when we meet the first line of the song, it’s as if we are walking in on the middle of a conversation that’s already halfway over by the time we get there (“Bobby helped me track you down, ‘cause I just saw your name in the paper”). But you want to stick around to hear the rest of it, even though you don’t know how it began. There is a bit of levity in that, because, just as a chorus is a fraction of a song, a conversation is a fraction of a lifetime. When I hear Hutson sharing anecdotes about the human condition in just four minutes, it makes sense to me, because it feels like stepping into a vacuum. There’s reassurance in there someplace, that if life really is supposed to be nothing more than a coin flip, maybe it’s best we leave things up to chance.

On Hutson’s records, a chorus can be just three words, and those three words can be an entire chapter of a book. Only someone of his talent could make music that is as brilliantly interpersonal as Taylor Swift’s but as chemically and compositionally haunted as something from Nick Drake’s Bryter Layter period. All of it is conversational, appearing like a tome of connectivity told through contradictions, embarrassments and wrinkles. “It’s like looking at a line drawing, where your brain starts to try and fill in the rest of it,” Hutson says. “I like what it does to my imagination when I hear other people that are really good at conversational writing. It leaves space for you, and I love that it gives you the freedom, as a listener, to paint your own picture and fill in the parts of your life. All of our subconsciouses are so interesting, and they will always tell us and teach us about ourselves. It’s the coolest trick, that your deep, hidden brain is trying to teach you about your life actively.”

It’s like hearing your parents fight through a wall. You can imagine, sort of, what they might be bickering about, but you’re really only getting key phrases. “Conversational songwriting does that, where you’re not like, ‘Sally and Jimmy are in a big fight. Jimmy said something mean to Sally,’” Hutson explains. “When you don’t have all the information, you get to be like, ‘Well, why are they fighting? What is the relationship like between them?’ And then you get to fill it in with, like, ‘Oh, it’s a conversation between a mom and a son, or between two friends.’”

When considering all of this, Hutson cites the Michigan songwriter Harlan Howard as an inspiration. “He worked some construction job and, on his way to and from work, he would turn the radio down just so it was barely audible,” he says. “And he would write songs about what he thought they were saying when he could barely hear it. He said it was always more interesting than if you actually turned the radio on to hear what they were saying, because it was the shit from his own life, that he wasn’t aware of, that would come out.” All of this makes sense; that couplet Howard wrote in “I Fall to Pieces” that goes “each time I go out with someone new, you walk by and I fall to pieces” exists in a similar hue as Hutson’s “You only think about falling in love, I only think about you.”

Too, there are motifs of delicacy and gentleness in Hutson’s work. “I swirl around the ice in my glass, and it looks like water ballet, synchronized swimmers circle the drain,” he sings on Paradise Pop. 10, lines that transport me back to the closing remarks of Quitters two years ago, when Hutson sang about an infinity symbol lifting a figure skater into the sky. “There’s a consolation prize in the corner of my mind,” he hums in a conclusion just as he had 12 songs earlier on “Strawberry Lemonade.” It’s an attention to the prettiness of movement and the prettiness of being present with someone else. Elliott Smith knew a thing or two about that, as did Nick Drake 20 years before him. In these moments, rooms can look like a bruise, or someone can fumble around for their clothes in the dark. All of it feels just as romantic and complicated as it does cinematic.

“I fucking love movies, honestly,” Hutson says. “I really want to understand where we are, and there’s something about that that feels really important to me when I’m writing about placing ourselves somewhere in space and time and giving a point of orientation so that you can just imagine a little bit better. It gives you a place. If I’m trying to remember the way something felt, the thing I’ll remember first is going to the beach in Dorset and it being called the Jurassic Coast and there being a bunch of trash on the beach.” Hutson is among a kin of songwriters who orient themselves in their own emotional memories, whether it’s through reminders of how something smells, or what it looked like watching a figure skater hold up another figure skater, or what it sounded like on a hot day when the ice is bobbing in that weird, bad Negroni that you’re drinking and clinking against the rim of the glass. “There’s a geographical relationship to the emotions that are happening,” he concludes.

He has a penchant for titling his song after images rather than repetitions. On Paradise Pop. 10, it’s “Tiger” and “Skeleton Crew” and “Candyland,” where he’ll cut you up with a recurring lament of “nothing else matters” and then leave it as a conclusion instead of an introduction. And, as pop music begs musicians to name their work after big, catchy, obsessive choruses, Hutson remains adverse to those temptations. Oftentimes, he picks out words for the tracklist because they are evocative of the moments where he got excited while writing them, not just because “go get ‘em, tiger” is such a generous, wistful affirmation. “I don’t consider myself to be a great chorus writer, but it might be a thing with my memory,” he says. “I want to have some kind of connection to the moment that I felt the song take shape and become meaningful to me.”

Over the last decade, Hutson has written songs about someone he loves, and he has written songs with someone he loves; he wrote some of Beginners with his now ex-wife, and he wrote six of the Paradise Pop. 10 songs with his current partner. The names might change, but the intimacy is measured all the same. The gestures are complicated, but the art you make together remains a balm of trust and knowledge. “Writing with somebody you love can be really difficult,” he says. “Writing about somebody you love also is difficult, in a different way. Writing with somebody you love, you can explore and there’s a sense of mutual accomplishment. You’ve both learned about each other and learned about the world and found something. Writing about somebody you love, it’s almost like you’re writing more about yourself and what you noticed. It feels more like you are writing about somebody you love when you’re writing it with them.”

What draws me to a record like Paradise Pop. 10 is how Hutson presents love as a language. It’s two men, who wanted to kiss as boys, playing pickup basketball and drinking whiskey and regret in their cars. It’s watching a lover put a watermelon under her shirt and affirming her that she’ll be a better parent than her own mother was. It’s painting a room delphinium because you miss someone who liked that shade of blue. It’s a corner booth now vacant after she broke the news.

“I’m not a doctor, but I think you have a broken heart,” Hutson sings on “Fan Fiction.” “I write fan fiction of life, I could write you a happier part.” There rests the crux of an album like Paradise Pop. 10—a push and pull between remembering and forgetting. Grief is how we visit people, and memory is how we affix them to our past. Revision, editing and the liberties of what’s real and what’s fake bleed off the lyric sheet and into the template of living in Hutson’s oeuvre, as the vocation of songwriting lets him stretch certain truths into a fabled catharsis and then, by default, offer some kind of healing or closure. When he sang “If you tell a lie for long enough, then it becomes the truth” on “Rubberneckers,” I couldn’t help but think of the best George Costanza line in Seinfeld: “It’s not a lie if you believe it.” As writers, we interact with our art from a safe distance, even if it’s new or it hurts or we’ve been carrying it with us forever. We bend and we bend and we bend.

“Your characters, you can make them do the right thing or the wrong thing or play out some kind of fantasy,” Hutson says. “The idea that you have figured out what is right in that situation, or how to put something away that is over, or finish the conversation in the way that you wish you had—in the same way as my mom’s saying about having another chance today—it feels like a new opportunity to unload and get rid of stuff. Then, you’re not holding on to the conversation that didn’t go well, or the thing you can never figure out about your parents. Taking a stab at it feels like you can send it somewhere, instead of having to be full of it. You don’t have to hold on to it any longer.”

“In one life we are married,” Scott McClanahan wrote in The Sarah Book seven years ago. “In one life we are dead. In one we are rich. In one we are poor. In one we are parents. But always we belong to others.” At the end of Paradise Pop. 10, Hutson’s characters drink sangria out of Dixie cups, fish for compliments, reject friendly advice and drop out of beauty school. These people deserve the company they keep, as their direction always turns back toward one another’s destruction. Still, while Paradise Pop. 10 is an album that is sad more than it is anything else, Hutson wouldn’t dare say goodbye without reminding us again that we are alive. “I see potential in you,” he sings, just like Jackson Browne sang “go on smiling so clear and so bright” 40 years ago. It’s like a wise woman once said: You get to begin again tomorrow.

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Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.