Recorded over a weekend at Los Angeles’s famed Sound City Studios – where Johnny Cash, Tom Petty and and Fleetwood Mac have also recorded well-loved songs – Christian Lee Hutson reimagined five tracks from his latest album and a previous fan favourite, ‘Rubberneckers’, for Paradise Pop. 10 Deluxe coming out June 6.
Featuring only Hutson on acoustic guitar and cello and violinist Odessa Jorgensen (Old Crow Medicine Show, Abigail Washburn, Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes), listen to the new warm and wistful version of ‘After Hours (Deluxe)’ below.
Listen to ‘After Hours (Deluxe)’
Lyrically the song’s narrator is looking down from a condominium in a corporatized Heaven to the woman he misses back on earth. “Big budget productions of the lives of your loved ones / The good stuff is behind a paywall”. Though the citizens of this Heaven are offered daily glimpses into life on Earth, our narrator prefers to imagine the minutiae of his love’s routine while he waits for her to join him.
“I’ve never done a deluxe for an album but there were a few songs that I wanted to try to document in a more stripped-down fashion, more like how I’ve been doing them on tour,” Hutson explained. “The opening track of ‘Paradise Pop. 10’, “Tiger”, initially had completely different lyrics which Maya Hawke and I wrote and edited a bit here so that we could include a version of it. We decided to call that “Tiger 2” even though it is technically a prequel.”
Paradise Pop. 10 takes its name from a real life “town” set deep in the woods of Parke County, Indiana, near where Hutson spent some of his childhood. There, just past the population sign, you’ll find a row of five houses on one side of the road and a cemetery on the other. Such a sleepy backwater could feel like a limbo of sorts, like time is frozen; leaving room for your mind to wander either backward into your regrets of the past or forward into the future, into the unknown. But if you can learn to quiet these thoughts, you might realise you aren’t waiting at all. There is no delay. You are living. You are here.
Praise for Christian Lee Hutson
“On this album and in [“Carousel Horses”], Christian Lee Hutson explores the idea of who we are supposed to be and how do we get there.” – NPR’s All Songs Considered
“[Hutson] approaches lyrics with the depth and insight of a fiction writer, populating his songs with well-sketched characters and observations. … ‘Paradise Pop. 10’ may be his strongest, most quietly devastating release yet.” – BrooklynVegan
“Only someone of his talent could make music that is as brilliantly interpersonal as Taylor Swift’s but as chemically and compositionally haunted as something from Nick Drake’s ’Bryter Layter’ period.” – Paste Magazine
Christian Lee Hutson
‘Paradise Pop. 10 (Deluxe)’
Tracklisting:
1. Tiger
2. Carousel Horses
3. Autopilot
4. Water Ballet
5. Candyland
6. Flamingos
7. Fan Fiction
8. After Hours
9. Forever Immortalized
10. Skeleton Crew
11. Beauty School
12. Tiger 2 (Deluxe)
13. Carousel Horses (Deluxe)
14. Flamingos (Deluxe)
15. Beauty School (Deluxe)
16. Rubberneckers (Deluxe)
17. After Hours (Deluxe)
