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
Bats tucked inside jackets, cats secretly brought into gigs in tote bags, and unexpected run ins with bikers hoping to take them away for a night out. It is safe to say that Boy Harsher have experienced their fair share of bizarre moments while touring. For Jae Matthews and Augustus Muller, though, these unusual encounters have become part of the job. The darkwave duo have spent years crafting haunting music driven by heavy synths, building a loyal community of equally unconventional fans along the way. This autumn, they returned with GET MEAN, their latest album, which has excited longtime listeners and attracted a whole new wave of fans. The release also marks their first major album tour since ending their relationship in 2024. Interestingly, their separation appears to have brought their musical partnership closer together, although learning to share the stage again was not always easy. “That was really a learn by fire situation,” Matthews says, remembering their first performances following the breakup. “I cried every day. But now we really have a system figured out.” Speaking from Eugene, Oregon, the two musicians discussed the challenges of touring after a breakup, emotional moments behind the scenes, and their late night McDonalds runs.
EMILY SANDSTROM: How has the response to the new album been?
JAE MATTHEWS: I think good. Gus is doing the thing where he is not in view, so he is just making funny faces at me. How has the response been, Gus?
GUS MULLER: I’m really trying not to read the comments, but it’s been fun to play live.
SANDSTROM: Do you get a lot of hate comments?
MULLER: Not reading the comments, so I wouldn’t know if they’re happy or sad.
MATTHEWS: I mean, people really love to scrutinize women in particular. So I’ve received a lot of interesting noise, but no one says jack shit about what Gus looks like. Gus said he couldn’t take it if they did.
SANDSTROM: That’s funny. But yeah, that’s a real thing.
MATTHEWS: Yeah. But generally, Gus is correct. I don’t want to read much about the album, but we’ve been playing these shows that have been nuts and people are singing along to the new material. And then, because the vibe has been so pleasant, sometimes I’ll go out and say hi to a couple people. I’m like, “Yeah, fuck it. I want to go out and say hi and take a couple selfies or whatever.”
SANDSTROM: Has that come back to bite you at all? Has anything weird happened or has anyone been kind of crazy?
MATTHEWS: I think the craziness is the fact that we have developed systems that generate complete neurosocial relationships and a lot of fandom now is circled around knowing the star intimately. So I think people meet me and they think they know me. They think they understand who I am, and that feels strange. I’m like, “I love that you love my music and I love that you support me, but I also need this boundary because you don’t know who I am.” I don’t have a stalker, which I am thankful for. But I sometimes definitely go wacky bananas. I almost got on a motorcycle in Macedonia because a fan was like, “You ever been on a crotch rocket? Let’s go.”
SANDSTROM: Wait, you should have gone.
MATTHEWS: My tour manager was like, “Jae, if you get on that bike, we won’t be able to trace you. You won’t have data. You potentially will be kidnapped.” I should have gone on the bike though.
SANDSTROM: Another bike will appear. What’s been your favorite stop thus far and least favorite stop, and why?
MATTHEWS: I think that we’re going to probably be sweet about our least favorite, because a musician once was asked, “Who do you think is the most overrated band right now?” And they said us, and it really fucking hurt my feelings. So now, I’ll never answer a question like that. But honestly, Denver and Detroit rocked it so insanely hard in ways that I was on stage taken aback. Denver is nuts too because it sold out really quickly, and people were in their element. There’s a lot of discourse on cell phone usage at shows, and I will say that if you have your phone down and you’re just dancing, I know that you’re embodying my music and that is the coolest thing to witness.
SANDSTROM: Do you feel like the crowd has changed a lot on this record? What does the average Boy Harsher fan look like now?
MATTHEWS: I think that crowds in general have changed a lot, period, not just for Boy Harsher. We’ve been very, very thankful to have a strong gothic community because they’re always fun and they look good. I wonder sometimes if there are more people who are accessing our music and being like, “Who are they?” But I’m never going to be mean or rude about that. The dream is to have everyone who wants to hear it and enjoys hearing it have access to my songs. I actually don’t think I’ve noticed, in terms of the crowd, different types of people, but I’m going to think about that right now.
SANDSTROM: What’s the weirdest thing you’ve seen someone bring into a show?
MATTHEWS: This one’s kind of easy for me because it’s also one of my favorite shows ever. We played Kyiv several years ago at this amazing club. I was outside before or after our set and there was this strange Ukrainian gothic person sitting there. They’re like, “Oh, they won’t let me come into your show because I brought my pet.” And I was like, “What? You brought your pet?” And they opened their jacket and they had a little bat.
SANDSTROM: Oh, no. I hate that so much.
MATTHEWS: Honestly, it was so cute though. I mean, I was worried. I was like, “Your bat definitely doesn’t want to go into a loud music show. They use sonar.” That would be awful.
SANDSTROM: I didn’t even know you could carry bats around like that. I thought they had more agency.
MATTHEWS: Maybe this bat was really needy and attached to them and it was a parental thing. It has come to a Boy Harsher show. Do you have any?
MULLER: Yeah, we did a record signing the other day and someone took their cat out of their tote bag to say hi.
SANDSTROM: Oh, no. Was it on a leash?
MULLER: It was just chilling. It was very polite.
MATTHEWS: It was on a figurative and a physical leash, for sure.
SANDSTROM: Wow, interesting. Do you guys have rituals before you play shows?
MULLER: I don’t, but I’m trying to. I’m playing guitar on this tour. I’ve been trying to warm up on guitar. Jae is just belting in the green room.
MATTHEWS: Yeah. I shut down the green room one hour before stage time where I’m allowed to be alone. I’m very, very social and people want to come into the green room to be like, “What’s up?,” and I can’t say no. I want to see them too. So I have to lock the door, have my TM be like, “Shh.” That hour is my hour to have my anxiety. I do my vocal warmups. I do my makeup most of the time. I’ll finally put the clothes on that I have to wear on stage. I obsessively read my lyrics because my number one nightmare is forgetting lyrics. Sometimes it helps, but a lot of times it just makes me more nervous.
SANDSTROM: Has anything gone wrong on stage yet or has there been a big mix-up?
MATTHEWS: On this tour, it’s been very good, hyper-professional. It’s almost as if we’ve been doing it now for over 10 years and we’re finally starting to figure it out.
SANDSTROM: What’s the worst thing that’s happened at a show?
MATTHEWS: This is my classic story. I fucked up big time at this huge gothic festival in Leipzig called Wave-Gotik-Treffen. Every single goth in Germany has their journey to Leipzig to go to the show, and it’s the first time we ever played in Germany. It felt like the pressure was really high. We roll up late because we’re coming from Berlin. I don’t eat. I just start drinking gin or something crazy, so I’m drunk, mistake number one. I walk onto stage. I don’t do my monitor mix because the sound engineer was like, “People will think it’s starting.” So I’m walking into a foreign monitor mix, and our set begins, and I am almost immediately totally lost. I rely on being able to hear the track in order to know where I sing. We were trying out a new song, a song that eventually was called “L.A.,” and I just messed it up completely. Then I started crying in front of everyone and I ran off stage. And I remember opening the curtains being like, “I got to get out of here.” My manager runs back and he’s like, “Please, please just go on stage, do ‘Pain.’ That is why they came here. Do ‘Pain’ and then you’ll be done.” I did “Pain,” but I was definitely blubbering a little bit. I swear to fucking god, I still run into Germans who are like, “I was there. I saw you cry on stage.”
SANDSTROM: Wow. I think that’s cool. It’s a theatrical and true expression.
MATTHEWS: I learned a lesson that day. I will never ever let that happen again.
MULLER: What, drink on an empty stomach?
MATTHEWS: Messing up the song is really what I mean. But yeah, I also don’t drink gin anymore, and I try not to have an empty stomach because that is pretty disastrous.
SANDSTROM: I imagine being on tour for that long takes a crazy toll on your body and mind.
MATTHEWS: It does. I feel like this tour, even though it is super professional and we have some more creature comforts, I’m feeling the weight of being on the road constantly and not sleeping well. I feel my age in a way that I think the tour has exaggerated the experience.
SANDSTROM: How do you guys get downtime? I know you have your ritual before, but any other indulgences?
MATTHEWS: I’ve been walking. We are in a city, so when I have some time, I try to walk somewhere. This is so sad to say, but I’ve been eating alone. That helps. Privacy is really, really hard to come by. I have found that if I go to a restaurant with my little book and eat some really overpriced sushi, I can have my Jae time. I tried to maintain some pilates, but it’s tough because you go to classes in random fucking cities and it’s so different. I was in a pilates class full of 22-year-old Mormon ballerinas and I was about to die, so that one’s a little more difficult.
SANDSTROM: That is very funny. I went on a work trip to Arkansas one time, and I was doing pilates with a bunch of Arkansas housewives who wore bright orange. It is different city to city.
MATTHEWS: I feel like you get used to your teacher too, and then having to figure out this one night stand with a different teacher—I don’t love that. I have really tight hamstrings and I just need my girl because she gets that.
SANDSTROM: I always want to know what people eat on tour because some people eat crazy.
MULLER: I’ve been eating pretty bad. And Jae, you’re not helping. You went to McDonald’s at midnight and got everybody chicken nuggets.
MATTHEWS: I really like chicken nuggets. Chicken’s something new in my life. I was a vegetarian for most of my childhood, and so I’ve just introduced chicken and wow. McDonald’s chicken nuggets? Chef’s kiss.
SANDSTROM: I don’t know if I’m the first person to ask you this, but how’s touring post-breakup?
MATTHEWS: It was really, really hard at first. Our first tour after the breakup was technically Coachella in 2024. That was really a learn by fire situation. I was a mess. I cried every day. It was tough. I think now we have really figured out a system. Gus and I care about one another and we respect each other, so I think we prioritize trying to maintain a professional relationship that serves Boy Harsher. I always answer this and I feel like I never hear Gus’s response.
MULLER: Well, I mean, you’re having fun. Jae’s having fun. Everyone’s having fun.
MATTHEWS: Oh my god.
MULLER: I think Jae’s having a lot of fun this trip. No?
MATTHEWS: Why don’t you talk about the breakup? Don’t talk about me.
MULLER: I guess having something to do just kind of normalized it. Yeah, we went on this crazy Coachella tour, and I mean, your mom had just died.
MATTHEWS: It was the one year anniversary of her death, the first Coachella night. So that is also why I cried. My life changed drastically in a very small span of time, and I had to learn how to adjust.
SANDSTROM: Yeah, that makes sense. Thank you for answering that. I don’t know if it was rude, but—
MATTHEWS: No, I mean, so much of the album is about heartbreak.
MULLER: And we’re on the album cover.
MATTHEWS: Yeah, exactly. This is the first time that Gus and I allowed our physical form to be so forefront. We’ve never really been in music videos or album artwork because I think we want to demonstrate this level of resilience. We really want to present Boy Harsher as this thing that could have easily just evaporated because we were going through so much, but we didn’t want that to happen.
SANDSTROM: When you guys are on tour, do you find time to write together or think about future stuff?
MATTHEWS: I can’t write. Oh, wait, Gus doesn’t agree.
MULLER: Well, it depends. I think we’ve gotten better at it. I think we got better at laptop art. We went on a tour last summer. We went to Tasmania. We were working in the studio on our days off.
MATTHEWS: We were invited to Dark Mofo. The thing about Tasmania is, when you go over there, you have to be there for a couple days to acclimate. And we worked in the most beautiful studio on the best FKA twigs remix ever that never saw the light of day.
SANDSTROM: Oh, you got to put that out. That sounds good.
MATTHEWS: We’ve got to leak it. But if we have days off, then studio days are really fun because you’re already exercising those muscles while performing every night, and then you just get really inspired by literally watching people respond to the elements of your music.
SANDSTROM: Final question: what’s your favorite song to play live and your least favorite song to play live, and why?
MULLER: Favorite song has been “Break Me” off the new record. My least favorite song to play is “Motion.”
MATTHEWS: “Motion” is a fan favorite song, and we’ve never played it live. It’s on Country Girl, so that’s a 2017 or ’18 release. Gus is a total grump when we play it. I think my favorite song, which was surprising, is a song on the new album called “Coming Home.” The first night we did that in Hudson, New York, I cried while I was singing it, but not out of delirium or anything. I suddenly had this surge of like, “Wow, I did it. We did it.” It’s a really fun song to play live because I sing about how I am suicidal, I was about to kill myself, and then it has such a ramp up that I think you can feel the joy. It’s very anthemic. My least favorite—that is tough. New songs are hard for me because I’m like, “Am I going to fuck this up?” We tried to do “Falling” the other night and I’m like, “Oh my god, don’t forget.” I’m just crazy anxious. Sometimes “Pain” is really hard for me to play live.
SANDSTROM: Yeah.
MATTHEWS: But sometimes it’s the best song ever. It drops, people are screaming like we’re the fucking Beatles, and then “Pain” starts and I just have this weird sense, like I’m just so sad or flat while people are still in it. This is going to be a weird comparison, but it’s almost like having sex with someone you don’t know.
SANDSTROM: I think I understand what you mean.
MATTHEWS: There is something enjoyable about it, but you’re missing that intimacy. And not everyone does this, but I certainly have sex for intimacy.
SANDSTROM: Right. So it’s almost like discovery, that song?
MATTHEWS: Or it’s like a dissociation or something. When I don’t feel the vibe, it’s probably because it’s a little bit of a dissociative experience, and maybe that’s what I’m reacting to.
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