Christian Lee Hutson recorded so many versions of his new album, Beginners, that the day before it was finally released last month, the singer-songwriter joked with his friends about a dark possibility: “There’s still time to record it one more time.”
Hutson, 29, first began work on his new plaintive folk collection in 2014, back when he was still touring the country as an aspiring retro-country singer, performing Gram Parsons and George Jones covers at an endless string of what he now refers to as “fucking spaghetti restaurants.”
Today, Hutson is an integral new voice in the extended collective of fast-rising twenty-something L.A. singer-songwriters helmed by Phoebe Bridgers, who produced the fourth — and, fortunately, final — version of Hutson’s new LP. (Others may know him for helping solve a musical mystery in a recent viral episode of the Reply All podcast about a forgotten alt-rock radio hit from the Nineties.)
In the past few years, Hutson has also become an in-demand touring guitarist, playing with Jenny Lewis as well as Bridgers’ and Conor Oberst’s group Better Oblivion Community Center. Hutson is still amazed by the opportunity — Rilo Kiley and Bright Eyes are among his teenage favorites — and in general seems pleasantly perplexed as to how he’s gotten such gigs. Before Lewis hired him, he had never toured as a backing musician. “That was very weird,” he says. “I didn’t even own an electric guitar.”
Hutson’s recent SoCal success has come only after he spent the better part of a decade trying to build up enough self-confidence to convince himself that anyone would ever want to hear what he had to say.
“I just never imagined, really, that I could be taken seriously just by having good songs,” he says, by way of explanation for the years he spent trying to present himself as a hard-living Southern-influenced troubadour in the vein of Justin Townes Earle. “When you want to write songs, you look for different archetypes that you can imitate on your way to figuring out who you are. I had a weird kick of a fake accent. I just really was not confident at all, and thought that all these other things had to legitimize what I was doing.”
The perceived rural authenticity of singers like Gillian Welch, another one of Hutson’s early influences, reaffirmed his genre convictions. “Listening to her songs made me feel like, ‘No, my voice isn’t valuable in the shitty California voice that I have,'” he recalls. “When you grow up in Santa Monica, you don’t ever imagine that people would want to hear how anyone from there [sounds].” (What Hutson didn’t realize at the time is that Welch, too, grew up in Los Angeles.)
By the middle of last decade, he was still searching for a voice of his own. “Christian Lee Hutson is a work in progress,” reads a description from Trailer Fire Records, the indie label that released Hutson’s barely heard album Yeah Okay, I Know in 2014. “Whoever the gallantly self-defeating 24-year-old singer-songwriter is, he’s an amalgamation of a long line of Americana tradition.”
After discouraging stints in Nashville and New York, Hutson returned to L.A., unsure if he should give up on his dream of singing his own songs for a living. Then, in 2015, he met Dash Hutton, a former drummer in Haim (and the son of Three Dog Night’s Danny Hutton). Hutton had direct access to a studio and was well-connected, and he soon helped Hutson to record the first version of what would end up becoming Beginners.
Hutson spent a full five years recording, and then continuously re-recording, the album. The list of collaborators from that time reads like a who’s-who of mid-aughts L.A. singer-songwriters. For the first, Hutton-assisted attempt, Hutson was backed by Dawes; the third attempt was with Ethan Gruska, who’s worked with Blake Mills and Fiona Apple. “I truthfully just did not have the confidence in arranging things,” Hutson says.
None of the recordings felt right until he met Bridgers, who immediately bonded with him about their love for sparse recording. “I remember having a good talk [with her] about how our favorite versions of all our favorite songs in history end up being these sparse live versions,” he says.
Daniel Prakopcyk for Rolling Stone
One approach that helped Hutson feel more comfortable in his own voice was inspired by his hero Elliott Smith’s most identifiable studio trick: double-tracked vocals, a technique in which a singer layers two separate vocal takes together to add depth and richness to the recording. “I have to sing the song very matter-of-factly in order to do it again in the same way, so for me it makes me sound more relaxed and more myself,” says Hutson. “[Using double-tracked vocals] is when it started to sound like an album, instead of a bunch of really good musicians, and then my shitty voice on top.”
In its final form, the bittersweet nostalgia-noir narratives of Beginners are presented as unadorned acoustic songs with light instrumentation from Bridgers, Oberst, and associated collaborators like Marshall Vore and Nathaniel Walcott. Written over the span of many years, the album at times feels as though it tracks Hutson’s coming of age in real time (“I don’t remember getting older/But I’m slowing down” he sings early on). The sweetly romantic “Twin Soul” (“Covering our heads with a coat/When you said, ‘We could be more than friends”) was written, Hutson says, after he “had a really good day on tour in Norway.”
Hutson prefers to discuss the bruised origins of his music in vague terms, but he says that songs like “Talk” and “Lose This Number” are re-imaginations of “the circumstances of what the adults in your life were going through at the time you were a child.” Hutson’s poignant lyricism is on display on the latter song, which offers up a heartbreaking image of an adult reflecting on painful childhood separation. “I want to crawl into this daydream I’m having/And live here forever,” he sings in a double-tracked whisper. “Confetti blowing into the ocean/The three of us finally together.”
Then there’s “Get the Old Band Back Together,” a song that was partially inspired by a listless band Hutson grew up around as a teenager, which he claims once kicked out a member for wanting to get a day job.
“I realize the irony of what I’m about to say, considering how long I worked on my record,” he says, “but it’s about this band that’s been around for so long and has never put out any music.”
He swears the song is not about himself. “It was a really funny situation,” Hutson adds, “because it wasn’t my life.”
ON THE RISE
M.O.T.H.E.R. – the new collaborative band helmed by Robbie Furze of The Big Pink and currently featuring Jamie T and Jamie Hince of The Kills – have given their first proper interview, talking to NME about the emotional origins of the project, their aim to be “the guitar version of N.E.R.D.”, and their hit-list of future collaborators.
Revealing the new project at the end of May alongside the blistering anthemics of debut single ‘My Love’, Furze shared that the seeds of M.O.T.H.E.R. had come from losing his own parent after a prolonged illness. “My mum got sick about five years ago and was ill for about four years before she died,” he told NME.
“In that period I had a daughter, which was this real juxtaposition of death and birth. My mates – Jamie T and Jamie Hince – came together for me, and then sadly Jamie [Hince] lost his dad too,” Furze went on, sitting in a West London pub alongside Hince.
Hince continued: “I lost my dad four days after Robbie [lost his mum], and it felt like, if ever there was a calling, it was that. But it didn’t all come out of that doom and gloom. I hate mentioning COVID but everyone had so much time on their hands and there was this open creativity back then. I was working on music with Jamie T, sending each other stuff, and the idea for the three of us to do something together came out of that. It felt nice, like we were buying into this camaraderie, and this gang.”
The three musicians have previous credits together, with the two Jamies also writing on The Big Pink’s most recent album, 2022’s ‘The Love That’s Ours’. Fully collaborating on M.O.T.H.E.R., Furze joked, was like “the clash of three egos”. “Everyone wants to work with each other because you like what each other does, and so it’s not quite imposter syndrome but you have to live up to [that idea] and jump in and be a character,” Hince continued. “You can’t be too humble about it.”
Recording between Hince’s studio in LA and Furze’s studio in London’s Bethnal Green, the current trio have also dropped their self-titled debut EP featuring three further tracks: ‘Real Human’, ‘Traitor’, and ‘Surrender’. The ethos of the band, meanwhile, is for the line-up to shift with each release, bringing in familiar faces from other groups and working with whoever might be available at the time.
“We did a little bit [of recording] with Jenny [Lee Lindberg, bassist] from Warpaint who I love; I really want to get something solid down with her,” revealed Hince, while Furze suggested that names including Zach Hill of industrial hip-hop trio Death Grips, and electronic producer Skream have all been in the mix for future iterations of the band.
“We ran into Zach and he seemed into it but then he started ghosting me,” he noted. “Whether or not he decides to text me back, it would be wonderful to have that kind of thing. Jamie Hince, Skream, Rhys Webb from The Horrors [who played on their recent radio session], and Zach – if I saw that, I’d wanna hear what that nonsense sounds like!”
Check out the rest of the interview with Furze and Hince below, as they discuss their endearing bromance, their admiration for Jamie T, and why the band are unlikely to ever make an album.
NME: Hello Robbie and Jamie! You must have been kicking about at a lot of ‘00s parties, how far does your friendship go back?
Robbie Furze: “Me and Jamie T started becoming friends on the circuit of festivals when the first Big Pink record came out in 2009. Then me and Jamie Hince met at Corona Capital in Mexico in 2012.”
Jamie Hince: “He had a reputation – I think we all had reputations… I remember his wife giving me these dried insect snacks and I didn’t eat them because I thought he might have laced them with something…”
Furze: “Every band playing Corona Capital was staying in this massive hotel, so it was just chaos.”
Hince: “It was at the height of ego. Everyone had bodyguards. Bands were trying to outdo other bands. Like, The Black Keys – you’re two guys from Ohio, you don’t need armed bodyguards…”
Where does Jamie T fit into all this?
Hince: “Our orbits crossed quite a bit. I remember seeing him at some tiny little pub when he was probably about 19, and I love how it’s come full circle. My heart sinks a little bit when I see Jamie T working because I know I’m nowhere near [as good as] that. I have to chip away at things and stand back and then dive in again to get the feeling, whereas he’s just got the feeling from the start.”
Furze: “He’s pretty incredible. The song ‘Traitor’ on the EP was supposed to be for my vocal, and he was almost getting pissed off that we couldn’t get the verses right. He was just like, ‘I’ll sort it out’, goes up to the mic, does one take and it’s done. See you later. He’s that kind of guy.”
Do you have to leave your ego at the door in those situations?
Hince: “I did this amazing beat for ‘Traitor’ that I loved, and I sent it to Jamie T and got back a text saying: ‘One pound fish’. Fuck! I mean talk about leaving your ego at the door… I know what he was saying, he thought it was a bit ‘cor blimey’ waltz. But some of the shit he ends up doing, it’s totally ‘cor blimey one pound fish’!”
Furze: “But whatever works for the track works, and everyone has to be happy with it. You push each other without really knowing it.”
How did you envision the project?
Hince: “These things just come together. It sounds cheesy, but I wanted it to be the guitar version of N.E.R.D. – a production team of people that love each other.”
Furze: “We’ve got songs in the pipeline with other artists already, and it makes it like an N.E.R.D. or Unkle or Massive Attack thing. Being collaborative makes me more excited.”
Hince: “It feels like that time has gone where albums really last. Records seem to come and go quite quickly now. So I’ve shifted my enthusiasm because I think the attention span has gone. You spend so much time making records and so little time getting any reward.”
Furze: “I’d like to do standalone singles, or another EP of four or five tracks as a batch. I wouldn’t wanna go further than that.”
None of your individual bands and projects sound that alike – where do you think your tastes align?
Hince: “There’s something unspoken that we all seem to agree on which is this epic-ness. There’s a line in one of the songs that talks about ‘the last of the hooligans‘ and that seemed to be the feeling behind it all. If there’s a similarity with what everyone wanted, it was maybe just being a bit romantic and epic.”
Why do you think you were drawn to that?
Hince: “I don’t know, maybe we’re just lonely men?”
Furze: “Beaten down but being pulled up by hope…”
Hince: “We’ve all been bashing around, making all this noise and spending so much time doing it; I think it gives you that feeling. There’s something tiny and irrelevant about what you do but something life and death about what you do too, and I think the cocktail of that makes it… well, the last of the hooligans.”
Tell us a bit about ‘My Love’ – the first proper single.
Furze: “It’s one of the most basic songs. It’s a love song about hope, but it just has such an incredible energy to it with its simplicity. I’m not a massive Beatles fan but it has this relatable energy [like their early music]. ‘I wanna hold your hand’ – you don’t get more basic than that, in a great way. I think simplicity is power. Sometimes less is more, and if you mean it you can get away with it.”
Are there going to be live shows?
Furze: “Definitely. We’re playing a bit of catch up because we didn’t think ‘My Love’ would get the reaction it has, but we’re desperate to get out and do gigs.”
Hince: “In the spirit of the collaborative project, I’m really liking the idea of having different people in different countries playing with us; having a different vibe each time.”
Furze: “It would be really exciting to see different characters that you know from different bands. For the radio session [with Steve Lamacq on BBC 6 Music] we had Rhys Webb from The Horrors on bass, and I love that idea.”
You’re obviously very close – what are your favourite memories of this charming bromance?
Furze: “Jamie’s probably my best friend in the world and we’ve been through a lot together. In 2015 we both uprooted and went out to LA together, I went out there for about five years and he stayed, so we were pretty inseparable. It got to a point where it was breakfast, lunch and dinner together.”
Hince: “We just became one person. People would confuse us even though we don’t look the same. He had an ex-girlfriend who he went to say hello to and she said, ‘Hello Jamie’. We just started having the same vibe. The same embarrassing energy. We’ve chilled out a bit recently but when I was in LA and Robbie was in London we’d speak to each other for four hours a day. I was getting complaints from his wife.”
The ‘M.O.T.H.E.R. EP’ is out now.
The Big Pink returned with their third studio album, ‘The Love That’s Ours’, in 2022. It marked their first full-length effort in over 10 years. T and Hince worked on that LP, too, co-writing the single ‘Love Spins On Its Axis’.
The Kills released their sixth and latest record, ‘God Games’, in 2023.
Jamie T, meanwhile, made a comeback with ‘The Theory Of Whatever’ the previous year. He recently joined forces with Fred Again.. on the track ‘Lights Burn Dimmer’, and performed with The Maccabees at their big London reunion gig last summer.
