Even at its sparsest, Christian Lee Hutson‘s music is populated by a cast of characters living out their own little worlds, perpetually caught between past and future, fiction and reality. Throughout his albums, the singer-songwriter entangles their stories and perspectives while weaving in bits of his own, so you can never tell what the real timeline is: “In a mirror universe, time is moving in reverse,” he sings on ‘Beauty School’, the closing track on his new album, Paradise Pop. 10. His songs are as intimately affecting and empathetic as they were on Beginners and its 2022 follow-up, Quitters, but they are also newly intricate and atmospheric in ways that highlight their otherworldly, cinematic nature; a short film, directed by Megan Ha, also accompanied the album’s release on Friday. Co-produced by longtime collaborators Phoebe Bridgers, Marshall Vore, and Joseph Lorge, with Bridgers, Katy Kirby, and Maya Hawke contributing guest vocals, Paradise Pop. 10 elicits a familiar warmth even when the people inhabiting it are in tumult, on the verge of losing touch with what’sin front of them. Even as the person with narrative control over their predicament, Hutson doesn’t write like he knows better; he’s a visitor, too, fishing out vignettes that may never add up to a full picture, but nudge you just enough to move ahead.
We caught up with Christian Lee Hutson to talk about every song on Paradise Pop. 10. Read our track-by-track breakdown and listen to the album below.
1. Tiger
This is one of the sparsest songs on the record, but at the same time, it sketches out a whole relationship. Did you envision it as the opener early on?
Not while I was writing it, but while we were recording it, I thought it would be really fun to do – the last track on Quitters was also a really quiet piano song, and for some reason, I liked the idea of this one feeling like it existed in the same sonic space, like if you were to turn the page, you’re still in a similar environment sonically. But I just liked the story. I liked that we began in a play, and in some ways, the record feels like a version of a little play that I’ve made up with all my characters. It’s like my own little Our Town or something – this is my little paradise, my little town full of my little guys bouncing around, living their funny lives. That felt like a good introduction to setting you up in a kind of theater.
I love the relationship in the song. It was really fun to write that character. I love that he sort of martyrs himself in the relationship in the song – he takes himself out of the equation in his relationship. For me as a listener, it seems like he sees himself as dead weight – maybe similar to a later song, ‘Flamingos’, where he sees himself as someone whose passion is the other person, and the other person’s passion is following their dream of becoming an actor or an artist.
The lines “I’m sitting on the fence/ Between the life we almost had/ And whatever’s coming next” feel like a summation of what the song, and a lot of the album, is about.
Yeah, there’s a lot of fence-sitters on the album – people that are in between whatever they’re coming out of and whatever future they know nothing about.
In the final minute or so, the instrumentation really pulls you into the atmosphere of the scene. It must have been wonderful to watch that come together.
I wrote that song with Maya Hawke, and when we were in the studio, she had the idea to put – we were going to see a lot of plays at the time, and she was like, “Next time we go to a show, we should get some audio of the atmosphere and insert it into the weird, chaotic outro.” It turned out really cool.
2. Carousel Horses
I read that this acts as a kind of spiritual sequel to the Quitters track ‘Age Difference’. Was the intention to revisit that character?
It didn’t start that way. Halfway through writing, we realized it seemed like a similar character to the one in ‘Age Difference’. Someone who’s also in a weird place in their life where they’re dating someone a lot younger than them, and they’re like, “Where do I exist in this space?” That song is about someone really struggling to express themselves, someone who’s very perceptive of the other person, or thinks they are – but then also, you catch all these strange judgments that tell you more about where they see themselves in their life. Like, maybe they’re in the process of having failed a lot of times, or having a hard time engaging with their sense of identity in the present moment. There’s a lot of holding themselves back from what they really want or feel.
But there was no intentionality, I don’t think, in making that a sequel. It just kind of sounded like it after the fact – maybe it’s not even the same person, just someone experiencing a very similar type of relationship in a different season or with a different take on it.
The parallel is interesting because they’re musically very different: ‘Age Difference’ is hazy and contemplative, and this is one of the most driving and big-sounding songs on the record, with Phoebe Bridgers, Maya Hawke, and Kaylee Sternberg all joining in on vocals. How did that come together?
That one came together at the last minute. We actually did an extra session, because we recorded most of the record, and that one and two other songs were written after we’d already finished most of the album. That one especially we wrote it the night before we recorded it and had no idea how to tackle it. Marshall had this idea to make it like a My Bloody Valentine-style, loud, grungy kind of song because we’d never done that before, even though we like that kind of stuff. It was more of an experiment of: not everything has to be quiet, maybe we just have fun and rock out a little bit. I remember on the day thinking it would be so fun to do with the band. It’s nice to give us a moment to not be in the atmospheric world of really singer-songwriter-y stuff.
3. Autopilot
The phrase that sticks out to me in capturing what it’s about is “hindsight bias.” What interested you about writing with that idea in mind, whether it’s running your life on autopilot or looking back on something with that kind of lens?
It was just something I was noticing at the time. I had a friend who was going through a breakup, and we were talking a lot about the instinct to re-narrativize something, to make it better or worse than it actually was so that you can put it away somewhere. This person was romanticizing their relationship, kind of ignoring the parts that didn’t work or the breakdown of it. I thought that was really interesting and relatable. I’ve been there many times in my life where I’m not looking at the global perspective of the situation – either torturing myself with how it was good and it’s over, or trying to comfort myself with the feeling that it was bad and it’s over. The truth is in between those things, and it was me exploring that in myself, vicariously through my friend’s situation.
The vocoder toward the end of the song is an interesting choice – it reminds me of how Katy Kirby uses it on her records.
Yeah, that was Phoebe’s idea. Even independent of this song, she thought it would be fun to try because we hadn’t done that before. I think maybe she had done it on Punisher, and we wanted to try it on one of these songs. She’s also a big fan of Katy, so I think that’s partially where it came from. The story of Katy’s vocoder is always funny to me, which is that she had a cold the day she was recording and didn’t think she could hit the notes well enough. But the vocoder was really fun to use, and it was fun to give it to Shahzad [Ismaily], who played a lot of the synths and bass on the album. He played my vocal take on the vocoder, and it was fun to watch him play it like it was an instrument instead of me just sitting there hitting the chords or whatever.
4. Water Ballet
If the previous song is about hindsight bias, this one feels like it’s actually about the benefit of hindsight. It seems to come from a more grounded or clear-minded headspace.
Yeah, I think it’s someone who has a bit more clarity on the situation. In a way, ‘Carousel Horses’ to ‘Water Ballet’, you could go through them as if that’s the same person in some ways, the different stages of them processing a breakup. “Why are we breaking up? How can I tell you how I feel?” “Wow, it was so good, it’ll never be that good again.” And then ‘Water Ballet’ is a more balanced, weighted view on a breakup.
You sing about disconnecting the dots on the song. Did you feel like assembling this album was kind of a way of connecting the dots?
I don’t know. It never really feels like that fully because I’m not very good at creating overarching narratives. That usually occurs to me later in the process. In that song, “disconnecting the dots” feels like a couple of things. There’s a pattern of conspiratorial thinking, something you can sometimes arrive at when you’re left to your own devices in your mind and you start becoming paranoid – like Charlie from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia connecting all the lines on a map to add up to, “I suck, I’m unlovable,” or, “That person sucks,” whatever the thing is. To me, that moment in the song is about letting go of creating a narrative and recognizing what’s there – again, that the truth is somewhere in between the two extremes of the situation.
5. Candyland
I love how the violin and Maya’s voice weave in with your vocals throughout the chorus. How did the arrangement of that part come together?
Almost every time Phoebe and I have made a record together – we love the Gillian Welch record Soul Journey, and we’re always like, “Fuck, it should just be like that.” Simple, like a band in a room playing, kind of scrappy, low-key. With that one, we tried to do that kind of thing. It’s all just one live take – there’s two overdubs, I think. We did a violin overdub, but the band and vocals were all live. The character in that song needed that shit-kicking, not-too-precious attitude. There’s a funny swagger in the way he talks or something, and that felt like it matched that approach really well.
I’m thinking of the lyrics, “Dismantling my time machine/ I’ll probably put back together for the final scene,” which seem pretty self-aware for you, as the songwriter, constructing a narrative. Was that a late addition to the song?
I think that might have been the first lyric I wrote for the song. I often take things and switch things them around to be like, “What narratively makes sense in this world?” But “dismantling the time machine” might have been the seed idea, which is to stop trying to travel back in time or into the future, to react to something there and be present in the part of the life or the relationship you’re in.
6. Flamingos
In a way, this feels like the emotional centerpiece of the record. What are your memories of bringing it to Phoebe and putting it together?
It kind of is. I think it was the first one I wrote for the record. My memories of putting it together are just that I didn’t have a chorus for so long. It’s tough when you have verses you like so much and can’t figure out what the thing is that’s supposed to bind them together. Phoebe loved it. She was really against the instinct that I had – I really didn’t want to have it be as sparse at first, maybe because I was like, “It’s so straightfoward.” My instinct was to try and produce it a little bit so it didn’t feel as vulnerable as it did, and she fought to keep it – one, on the piano. I kept trying to take it to guitar because I’m not a very good piano player, but she was like, “No, it’s great on piano. It should just be you and the piano.” So, we were able to keep it mostly just me and the piano, against my instincts. I now love it and I’m very proud of it. Something that direct, for some reason, I always am like, “Oh, it needs something to hide behind,” but I’m glad it doesn’t have that.
The character in that song is similar to the one in ‘Tiger’ – it’s in that world of, his passion is the other person, and the other person’s passion is just, in his mind, the idea of falling in love. Something about these people who make these absolute statements and summing things up is always really funny to me.
Was it your instinct to have Phoebe on vocals?
It wasn’t. I think we tried me singing harmony and it didn’t really have the right flavor. We’ve just worked on so much together, and she’s always the person that I’m like, “Well, you’re just gonna knock it out of the park on the first thing, so go do it.” [laughs]
Another thing – when I started writing that song, it started with the image of being in the airport. I was in the airport – I was on my way to see my girlfriend at the time. I like the idea of how, when you’re so excited to see somebody, time seems to move slowly, and all of a sudden you’re in the airport and everyone seems to be taking forever to get their bags out of the thing, and you’re like, “Oh my god!” Because you’re moments away from being back with the person you love, so you’re like, “How is every person moving so slowly? Don’t they know that there’s love in the world?!” I just liked that as a scene in my head. It was a fun place to start.
I’m curious if you can talk about this idea the song brings up of life as a competition, especially in relation to the places people grow up or end up in.
Maybe I haven’t thought about it that deeply, but I was raised in a really sports kind of family, so for some reason, those metaphors end up [sneaking in]. I’m naturally not a very competitive person, though I do see it coming up in my writing sometimes, where it’s almost like the person you’re competing with is yourself. The idea that if you can process and heal enough from your life, and recognize enough of your patterns, that is what winning is. Or if you find yourself in the same cycle and you’re not able to do that, you’re closer to losing or something – I don’t even know if that’s true. Maybe that’s where competition plays some kind of role – your life is sometimes about trying to beat the clock and discover how to be happy.
Or finding your place, even in a literal sense – what you call home. That’s almost part of the power dynamic in the song, with one person trying to convince the other to move.
Yeah, and even the character in the song describes themself as an orphan, so that’s the power dynamic – the other person has the power to represent some kind of home for them. I don’t know if “competition” is the word that I would use, but more like there’s something at stake for them, something they feel they don’t have access to.
7. Fan Fiction
We’ve been talking about characters, and some would describe your music as autobiographical, but I like the idea of “fan fiction of life” when it involves other people. This song especially feels gentle and generous toward the person it’s written.
Yeah, there’s a lot of love for the person being written about in the song. I became obsessed with this idea – I was talking to Maya about it a lot as we were working on songs for the record – there was someone I was dating, and their criticism of me was that I didn’t know how to access my own feelings, I had to write characters in order to understand the inner workings of my life. That I didn’t know how to feel, I had write a story about another person to experience my own emotions. That’s where the idea of ‘Fan Fiction’ came from, maybe recognizing that in myself. As we’re talking about this, with all of the songs, I’m like, “this character,” “that character,” so what she said is in part so true. And I feel like this one is the most autobiographically accurate, ironically, where it was important to me, in a sense of maybe trying to prove to myself that I could say how I felt without using a character, for this to be as accurate to the timeline and real things.
Where did that challenge lead you emotionally?
The character perspective – I don’t know what the therapeutic term for it is, it might be depersonalization or something like that. I do a lot of, in my own therapy, journaling in second-person perspective, so I’m talking about my own feelings as if I’m talking to someone else about their feelings. I’m like, “So you are feeling like…” Which is neither here nor there. It is really helpful to me because I’ve been someone who’s struggled at times in my life to feel like I’m allowed to feel my feelings or something. But it kind of led me to this place of, I was really happy to have written it and happy to have allowed myself the experience of writing something that wasn’t trying to create a world, that just existed in the world that it happened in. And I found that it wasn’t as scary to make it me as I thought it might be.
I’m also just realizing, hilariously, that in the attempt to be as accurate as possible – Maya wrote a significant amount of ‘Fan Fiction’ with me kind of just through listening to me talk about it. It’s like, still, I needed some kind of outside helper to help me understand my feelings for it. So, the criticism of being someone who’s not very good at feeling unless it’s another character – in some ways, there’s a perspective that it was outsourced, still, to help me understand through a different person.
8. After Hours
It’s just trying to tell the story of people that are separated by some kind of line that can’t be crossed back over, and so they’re trying to write through the walls to the person that they loved, hoping that they’ll be able to hear it.
There’s a lot of imagery packed into the song. Was it difficult to weave it together?
Not really. Actually, that one was the fastest one. It was maybe an hour of sitting down working on it, it felt like the story was all there. My friend is a great short story writer, this guy Sam Berman, and he has a short story called ‘Dogs of a Lesser Breed’ that he’d written about somebody in heaven who is finally meeting up with someone they knew back in their life. They finally died and got into heaven, and the whole story is them going to meet this person. It was one of the few rare times in my life where I had the idea of what the song should be – it’s a letter song. It’s someone writing a letter to someone that isn’t there yet about, just, “I miss you.” All the imagery I had already written down elsewhere from other things, and they fell into place really quickly. There was a very rare magical moment of not needing to beat a thing to death in order to understand it.
Was that also the case with the recording?
I think that was the first song that we started tracking, or maybe the second. But we had this weird guitar in the studio that Shahzad had, which had been strung up like a third a baritone guitar, a third a regular guitar, and a third like a natural-strung guitar. So it it had three octaves in it that were separated in really strange ways. I just remember sitting down and playing through it once and singing it, and then we spent a lot of time trying to figure out what the other musical characters were going to be in it. Who is in this weird angel band? Is it trumpet? We had a mandolin on it at one point, and we were like, “No, that sounds too much like you’re on the canal,” or something like that. There was a lot of trial and error in the in-between sections, figuring out who gets to be in that band in this fictional heaven.
9. Forever Immortalized
This song and the next one are the only ones where it’s just you playing. What role do you feel like it serves in the tracklist?
This one I feel like I had trouble placing it in the sequence. I kept trying to figure out where it’s supposed to go because it feels almost like the most standalone, and also the most autobiographical. I love Phoebe so much and wanted to write a song for her in this moment in her life, and that was really important to me. It’s my own little friendship song. And it’s hard to play for that reason because it’s like, “Who’s that character? Oh, it’s me writing about my friend.”
I love the line, “You’re either living the dream or dying in the nightmare.” You’re almost suggesting that it’s two sides of the same coin, calling back to ‘Fan Fiction’ where you sing about “the nightmare of my dreams.”
The thing that maybe makes it in theme in that way is that even just that line is talking about extremes and polar opposite ends of things – it’s not a dream or a nightmare; it’s just your life in the moment that you’re in, the present moment. It’s not the worst thing that’s ever happened, and it’s not the best thing that’s ever happened. It’s similarly trying to philosophize that the truth is in the middle and is not in the future or the past, but it’s right now. That is obviously something I was ruminating in my head, and that’s another place that it shows up.
How did Phoebe react to this song?
She loved it. I actually don’t even fully remember, but I know that she was stoked on it. It was very hard to record because we tried like three different versions of it: one where I played it on piano, one where I played it on guitar, and it didn’t work; one with drums. It just took a long time to figure out how to best do it, and then the simplest approach, which is just how I wrote it, ended up being the one that felt nicest.
10. Skeleton Crew
This was also a late addition, where we recorded it in the same session as ‘Carousel Horses’ and ‘Water Ballet’ because I had written it later. I almost left it off the record because I was like, “Maybe this guy doesn’t belong on here.” The narrative to me is: this guy falls in love, he gets married, and he’s so happy and loves his life so much. He and his wife have a baby that they’re raising and taking care of, but he hasn’t really dealt with his repressed feelings; he thinks he might be gay. He sits in the car with his buddy, and he feels like they’re gonna kiss, and then they don’t kiss, and he’s kind of relieved that they don’t. It’s just somebody at this weird, questioning place in their life. I kept picturing, even though the subject matter is different, this movie called Little Children, which tonally felt like it fit this thing. It’s just this kind of weird, suburban, middle-aged man in some kind of crisis of identity and fear of not having explored part of himself. I just hadn’t heard a song like that, and I felt like I understood the guy and his weird moment of confusion, of wondering what if he chose the wrong life, but he likes his life. That’s what it feels like the person is grappling with.
You set up the details around this confusing moment in a really interesting way. I’m curious how late of an addition it was – “Pink carnations/ Congratulations” took me back to the Grammys, and the song is called ‘Skeleton Crew’…
Oh, yeah! Actually, it was before that happened. That’s such a funny coincidence – I didn’t even think about that. Instead of directly saying this person feels this, I was trying to give more impressionistic little Polaroids from their life that sets you up in where they are, and then the time that you’re narratively in their life is in the moment where they almost cheat on their wife with their best friend in the parking lot. I don’t know where those images came from; it was just some imagined wedding.
11. Beauty School
Why did you decide to end the record with this one?
It just felt really good and positive. The melody of this one just feels so cool and uplifting, and the energy of it felt like a good place with all of these characters. Spiritually, it feels like an acceptance of the present moment and of self – you leave all these characters that are in the past and the future, in these weird places where they feel like their life is on pause, into what to me feels like a joyful exploration of what it feels like to be in love and to be living your life instead of living your past. It just felt like a nice, kind way to leave all these people on the record. Like, “It’s okay. Fucking rock it, guys!” It also feels like a kind of road trip movie.
There’s humor all over it: Even “I’m gonna turn my life around,” to me, there’s almost something funny in the phrasing of it, because it’s actually about changing the way you look at it.
Yeah, it’s just turning your life around from the past, putting it in the right order. He’s like, “No, we’re moving forward. And we aren’t, like, ahead. We are now. Everything is different right now.” There’s this thing that happens when you’re so stuck in the past and you’re reliving moments of your life, trying to figure out what went wrong or something – that feels like you are moving in reverse, and you’re being sucked back into it. You’re never reacting to stimuli that is in front of you. You’re reacting to stuff from years ago. I think that was the sentiment: just turn it in the right direction. Not sucked backwards, moving forward. That’s where we wanna go.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
Christian Lee Hutson’s Paradise Pop. 10 is out now via ANTI-.