Christian Lee Hutson - Quitters Review
Quitters is a character album, and it is their dialogue that make up the lyrics. Like ensuing tracks, opener Strawberry Lemonade consists of pockets of opinions, thoughts and advice on the passing of time from people that could either be useful touches of wisdom or complete banalities.
Listening to Christian Lee Hutson, it can’t be helped to think that he perhaps shares more of a lineage with the long list of great American short story writers, than any particular musician or genre. Of course, the beautiful finger-picked acoustic guitar and confessionals that form the spine of Quitters slots it firmly in the region of Elliott Smith indie-folk or folk-rock, but it’s the lyrics that really pull you in. A Hutson-penned song sings like a three-minute Sherwood Anderson, or a musical Carson McCullers, dealing in minutia, finding significance in the everyday thoughts or conversations with friends that most people may let flicker through and forget just as quickly as they happened.
Produced by friends Phoebe Bridgers and Conor Oberst, the album sails a sonic wave that will be familiar to fans of both. A contemporary Californian breezy air permeates each track while Hutson and his collaborators expand on the textures and instrumentation of first album Beginners. Hutson presents all this material with a quintessential modernity. It’s past irony, and it’s not cynical either – it’s a new sincerity delivered with a knowing humour. In Sitting Up With a Sick Friend, the main character recalls the friendship without platitude or proclamation, just simple memories that point to a deep and lasting connection. Standout Age Difference takes on the generational divide as someone who is “on the dark side of [their] thirties” finds themselves caught between ages, unable to connect to someone younger, “I think I was suicidal /Before you were even born”, but while home for the holidays they watch their “family drink the Kool-Aid / Powerless to stop them”.
Quitters is a character album, and it is their dialogue that make up the lyrics. Like ensuing tracks, opener Strawberry Lemonade consists of pockets of opinions, thoughts and advice on the passing of time from people that could either be useful touches of wisdom or complete banalities – with Hutson’s delivery and arrangement rendering them nonetheless equally as interesting. A friend John tells him that "We were raised on dreams that keep / Turning our fingers green", he ruminates on “a baby boomers last acid trip”, or in State Bird, “when life gives you a lemon /Cut a hole in it, smoke some resin”. It’s not a record that provides any assurances, but Hutson contends that the “consolation prize / In the corner of my mind” is, and maybe can only be, a devoted friendship, a consoling word, or just a sit-and-be-sad-with-me solidarity.
Speaking on the album title, Hutson said “there’s a lot of different types of quitting throughout the record: someone’s getting a divorce, someone’s quitting their job; I don’t know, there’s just a lot of people trying to make massive changes in their lives.” In 1912, the aforementioned Sherwood Anderson suffered a nervous breakdown that led him to abandon his business and family to become a writer, and there’s perhaps something in the thought that this giant of the American short story could easily play a small role in the narrative of this literary album. Nothing as dramatic, we hope, led Hutson to the writing of Quitters, but the songs on the record - the characters he sings of without judgement or decree - help validate these life experiences, sympathise with them, no matter how grand or insignificant they may seem at the time.