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.”
They keep winning the battle of the bands, but will they win the war? Fresh from a storming set at High Voltage festival in London, Music-News.com meets guitarist Nick Saxby, a founder member of British metallers Primitai, to find out their secret weapon
Primitai confess to being a laid-back band, taking each new experience as it comes. But after a few years of playing it cool and recording their debut album, Through the Gates of Hell, the five-piece got their act together. In 2009, they ultimately beat 20,000 – yes, 20,000 – groups of all genres to claim Surface Unsigned battle of the bands. So what gave them the edge?
“The thing that made us different was that we were a rock band: we had a vocalist as opposed to a screamer, because we like classic metal,” says guitarist Nick Saxby, pictured. “If you have an incredibly energetic set and you have a screaming frontman, that immediately alienates so many people. We sang and spoke to the crowd, and that's what gave us such a brilliant reaction.
“We try to connect with everyone in the audience. Our songs are really catchy, they're real fun, and they're real heavy at the same time. The pop lot liked the catchy part of it, the metal lot liked all the metal half. So that's what wiggled us all the way through.”
And winning this coveted competition, which saw them play their final set at the O2 in London, was not only a victory for them, but one for their genre.
“The only bit that was disappointing was all the metal bands were ranked in the bottom half, so [the competition] was favoured towards those bands that were much poppier and mainstream,” says Saxby. “It always felt like you're on a bit of an uphill struggle, but it gave us that extra oomph: 'no, you're not going to get rid of us, we'll keep going'.”
Determination and hard work is paying off for the five-piece – completed by Guy Miller on vocals, Srdjan Bilic on second lead guitar, Jamie Lordcastle on bass and drummer Chris Chilcott – and key to their late success was finally bagging someone to properly front the band. “All the real kick-offs have come since Srdjan and Guy joined,” says Saxby. “[Guy] was the missing element we needed to make it into a circle. We always wanted that frontman running around. It's always good to have that extra nutcase bouncing off the walls and that's exactly what Guy is.
“One of the prizes we won from Surface was a wireless microphone – and the wet dreams he's been having over that ever since, because he can go anywhere. He can go the length of a club and people respond so well to that. It was nothing we prompted him into. He's been in bands since he was 14, so he's well-rehearsed at what he does and he loves it. The energy we all create, it gives us a figurehead for that.”
With the line-up sorted and £10,000 of winnings in the bank, Primitai headed to the studio to make album number two, The Line of Fire.
“We didn't know what we were going for when we started with two new members,” says Saxby. “The first six months they were in the band we were just practising for Surface Unsigned and I was writing stuff in between. When we got to the studio, we thought: 'let's experiment'. A lot of the lyrics weren't done until they came out of Guy's mouth while he was singing them. I was working at the time and I was texting lyrics to Jamie to try out with what they were doing. It was a nice, laid-back, easy thing to do and we're all happy as fuck with it.”
The eight-track result is heavy and packed with riffs but carries the appeal that flattened the competition in 2009. They’re avoiding a niche sub-genre and flying the flag for British metal. Saxby says: “You don't want to cross that line too far. You like writing your catchy stuff and the heavy stuff at the same time, but you don't want to sell out.
“What I don't want when we do an album is for people to go: 'that's a single, that's a single, that's a single', and then those three singles come out one after another. We always try real hard to make all the tracks as good as each other; of course some tracks come out better than others because some songs just are.”
Touring as support for White Wizzard and Firewind has helped to tighten their set, and with High Voltage festival under their belts, plus Hard Rock Hell in December, the band are “gagging” to properly get out on the road again – and record album number three later in the year.
But first there's another prize to claim. Primitai recently whipped yet more rivals in a second battle of the bands, which honours them with a set at Bloodstock Open Air festival in August. A band this relaxed – and clearly talented – obviously don't feel any pressure then?
“By the time we got to the final [of Surface Unsigned], it was a bit like, if we win, amazing, if we don't, it's been a fucking incredible ride, so we just enjoyed it,” says Saxby. “It was just fun to do the last one, but running up to that, we were playing with bands that ended up in the final, so that added the pressure.
“The one we probably most enjoyed was the semi-final because we hired a confetti cannon at the end of our set. We went out all guns blazing: you will not forget Primitai! That was the one where we felt the most pressure as we knew we were ending with a bang.
"If you're involved in this year's Surface Unsigned, that's the only advice we can give: just make sure when everyone leaves they remember your set."
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