Presented by:
Zero Mile
Christian Lee Hutson
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Christian Lee Hutson
Christian Lee Hutson starts his new album Quitters with a laugh. In this follow up to his ANTI records debut, Beginners, Hutson moves away from the focus on growing up to the dread and complications of growing older. The laugh that announces Quitters is the kind you’ll find at the end of John Huston films, one of resignation and release, and somehow a cosmic laugh that says “California,” a place where lonely people gather together like birds. Across Quitters’ 13 tracks, Hutson crafts this portrait of the place he’s from. In these short story-like songs, Hutson presents characters who carry this golden light and sinister geography inside them. It’s a place where everything in the end gets blown away and paved over with something new, where even the ocean and fires are always whispering, “One day we’ll take it all back.” This is a Los Angeles in constant transition, where childhood is lost, where home is gone and can never be visited again. Yet Hutson’s world is also one of happy accidents, where doors are left open on purpose, hoping that someone new will walk through. In the end, what’s left are these songs created by some future spirit, written to comfort the person we are now. Produced by Phoebe Bridgers and Conor Oberst, Quitters is also a departure from the digital recording of his debut. Hutson stated, “When we made Beginners the aim was to make simple digital recordings of how I would play the songs in the room. With this record, Phoebe and Conor had an idea that it would be fun to make it to tape. Phoebe is my best friend and making Beginners with her was so comfortable and easy. So I wanted to work with her again.” “I took a long time with Beginners,” Hutson added. “I had those songs for 10 years, but these songs came out a lot faster.” Because the songs from Quitters were written in a shorter time, “there was a little bit of insecurity with the lyrics. Having Conor there served the purpose of someone who I really respect as a lyricist and could soothe my anxiety.” With Quitters, Hutson pulled from a wide range of influences for his second record: the tight rhymes of John Prine, Bob Mehr’s book about the Replacements Trouble Boys, and Scott McClanahan’s auto-fiction The Sarah Book. It’s a recording that also feels like a sonic expansion from Hutson’s debut. “We made Quitters all at once. We hadn’t seen each other for sixth months and this was the first time being in the room together again. It was a real familial feeling, working with the same people, playing with the same people where everyone gets so good at knowing one another’s tricks and are complimenting one another’s weird mistakes. My favorite records are when the guitar gets fucked up and then that becomes the recorded version. And it’s those accidents that make them special.” The song “Rubberneckers” announces Huston’s two great themes: memory and pain. Written along with his friend and artist Alex Lahey, “Rubberneckers” was the last song written for the album. Huston said, “After I made the record, I was thinking about marriage, about codependency and lying to yourself. You like to think this is my life and these are the parameters. You can’t even see you’re on this path until you wind up in the darkest wood, but you keep walking because the road is comfortable.” The song charts a relationship’s demise, through a proposal, a rupture, and then ultimately a breakup. Hutson pointed out,” It’s about the way that when your life is falling apart, friends fixate on the falling apart rather than just providing support.” The song also contains some of the album’s many perfect rhymes: Self-esteem vending machine/a doctor’s office magazine. Yet, the song “Cherry” returns Hutson to some of the high school themes from his first album. Hutson states, “I wrote that when we were mixing Beginners and is the first song that I wrote for this record.” The song charts the ridiculous “cringey” lies we tell in our adolescence. Hutson also pulled from memories of older friends from high school. Hutson said, “I wanted to describe that part of growing up in Los Angeles, having a cool older friend who will drive you speeding and have you jump out on the roof of the car. These people who do these flawed things and tell this type of lie.” However, Hutson’s gift is describing these characters and the world they inhabit without moralizing about it. He is less interested in the “why,” but in the simple mystery of describing these remembered moments from a place. Likewise, the song “Age Difference” allows Hutson to expand on the Los Angeles character song tradition of Randy Newman and Harry Nilsson. The track concerns a character who is finding that they are on the dark side of my thirties. Hutson said, “There’s a specific type of an older man that I have encountered a lot in LA. The aging rocker who hasn’t had a long relationship and they are the McConaughey-like character who is dating a much younger girl, and they have just stopped progressing.” Yet Hutson refuses to pass judgment in a world filled with judgment. Hutson is interested in describing the world the way it is, not the way we want it to be. So if every great record is a world, then this is Christian Lee Hutson’s world. It’s a California filled with the fuzzy haze of a dream, and the half-remembered moments of a forgotten life. Songs that say, “That was so long ago, but I still remember you.” A world where the past is never past, and the old people we once were still live inside the new people we are. It’s a record brave enough to say, “In the good old days, when times were bad.” But beyond the songs, it is this voice. The voice of someone who was alive in 2021 and recorded a group of songs with his friends for us to hear. And one day these people who shared these sounds will look back and say, “We were all there for a moment? And we were young once, weren’t we?” For there is a consolation prize. A breath on the window/A message that no one can see. While the whole world seemed to be ending, we still listened to one another. We tried to hear. And so we joined this sad laughter. Together. Bio by Scott McClanahan
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Another Michael
For Another Michael, it all boils down to trust. In mid-2017, the critically acclaimed indie three-piece packed their bags and collectively relocated from Albany, NY to a shared house in West Philadelphia. This move signaled not only the start of a new chapter for the trio, but also a deepening of the bonds that would come to define their captivating debut LP, ‘New Music and Big Pop.’ “It’s hard for a group of people to get closer than living together,” says bassist and producer Nick Sebastiano. “The stronger our connection grew, the more it shaped the music we found ourselves making.” It should come as little surprise, then, that ‘New Music and Big Pop’ is Another Michael’s most collaborative work yet. Recorded in a small A-frame house-turned-makeshift studio outside Ferndale, NY, the record finds the trio pushing their sound in a dreamier, more folk-influenced direction, building songs around vulnerable, intimate performances using an ethereal palette of breezy guitars, subtle keyboards, and layered harmonies. As on the band’s early EPs, singer and songwriter Michael Doherty’s mesmerizing voice is front and center here, calling to mind Robin Pecknold or Ben Bridwell in its reedy, crystalline timbre, but it feels more at home than ever before amidst the album’s lush, Technicolor landscape, which the band partnered with producer and fellow housemate Scoops Dardaris to create. The result is a masterfully understated record that belies its status as a full-length debut, a thoughtful, poetic, collection all about growth and change, hope and faith, endings and beginnings, delivered by a band that’s only just begun to scratch the surface of their story. “Recording a full-length album was something we’d been talking about doing for a while,” says Doherty, “but I think we needed to take our time and get here organically. We had to figure out who we were as a band first.” Launched initially as a solo project, Another Michael began garnering national attention with a pair of early EPs—2016’s ‘Sans’ and 2018’s ‘Land’—that synthesized an astonishingly broad range of influence, from lo-fi bedroom pop and dense chamber folk to PC music and electronic R&B. The sound reflected the eclectic nature of Doherty’s voracious musical appetite, which he honed through a lifetime of careful listening. “I’ve always been obsessed with discovery,” he explains. “As a kid, I was really into pop radio, and as I got older, I started finding music through MTV and VH1, and then through the internet. I’d listen to everything I could get my hands on, from Damien Rice and Bright Eyes to Usher and Kanye West to Radiohead and Dirty Projectors.” When launching the band, Doherty found ideal partners in Sebastiano, who grew up loving R&B and dance music, and guitarist/keyboardist/vocalist Alenni Davis, who got their start in the video game and classical worlds, and critics quickly took note of the band’s intoxicating chemistry. The Deli praised Doherty’s “clear-headed, stream-of- consciousness lyrics,” while Bandcamp Best Finds called the band’s sound “fresh and poignant in the most beautiful way,” and The Collaborative Magazine hailed their “breathtakingly peaceful songs about feeling chronically anxious.” The group toured extensively in support of both releases, eventually fleshing out their road lineup with a drummer, whose presence helped influence the music’s evolution. “When we started touring with a drummer, it really changed how I approached my role in the band,” says Davis. “I started gravitating more towards effects pedals and experimenting with sound and rhythm in ways that I never had before.” That spirit of experimentation lies at the heart of ‘New Music and Big Pop,’ which bears the distinct fingerprints of all three bandmates, from Sebastiano’s buoyant bass lines and Davis’ warm, open tuning guitar arrangements to Doherty’s gentle finger-picking and evocative lyricism, which focuses as much on the sound of the words as their meaning. While some of the material on the album dates back to the group’s earliest days, the vast majority of it was written after the move to Philadelphia, and very little of it was ever demoed or rehearsed before work on the album began. Instead, the band treated these songs as a space for free-range discovery and exploration, building tracks up spontaneously and together in the moment. That sonic freedom and deep emotional connection colors nearly every aspect of the album, which opens with the hypnotic “New Music.” Slow and steady, the track builds from a spare, fingerpicked intro to a sweeping, cinematic finale as Doherty reflects on the simple joy of falling in love with a song (and perhaps the person who shared it with you, as well). It’s an ideal entry point into the record, which balances beauty and uncertainty in equal measure as it takes an often meta look at what it means to devote your life to music. The driving “I Know You’re Wrong,” for instance, grapples with the day-to-day realities that pull us away from our creative pursuits, while the airy “What Gives?” relishes in the satisfaction that comes with crafting something out of nothing, and the playful “Big Pop” celebrates music’s power to communicate the otherwise inexplicable. “For a long time, I thought writing music about music was taboo, that songwriting needed to just focus on your personal life experiences,” says Doherty. “But then I realized that listening to music actually is a huge part of my personal life experiences. It felt so liberating to let go on this record and embrace how powerful music can be and what an important role it’s played in shaping who I am.” While Doherty frequently finds comfort in his relationship with art and music on the album, his relationship with himself and other humans tends to be a bit more complicated. The melancholic “What The Hell Is Going On?” struggles to connect with a lover before they depart for good, while the swirling “Shaky Cam” frets over the inherent frailty of our physical and mental health, and the wistful “Hone” tries to find something, anything to fill the emptiness that perpetually lurks inside of us. “In a way, my goal as a songwriter is to pack down these big life experiences into something that can breeze by and feel almost casual,” says Doherty. “I’m trying to tell a story using fragments of the big picture, focusing on these little moments and tiny details as a way of making sense of everything around me.” Indeed, the world can be a chaotic, confusing, heartbreaking place. It takes guts to face it openly and honestly, to lower your guard and let others in, but ‘New Music and Big Pop’ proves that the rewards will always outweigh the risk. All you need is trust.