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 favorite, “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 realize you aren’t waiting at all. There is no delay. You are living. You are here.
Next month Hutson is performing at many of the summer’s top European festivals – including Primavera Sound and Best Kept Secret – as well as opening for Ben Gibbard this August in Ridgefield, CT and co-headlining Levon Helms Studios in Woodstock with Cassandra Jenkins. All upcoming dates are listed below.
TOUR DATES
June 5 – London, UK @ St. Matthias Church & Hall
June 7 – Barcelona, Spain @ Primavera Sound 2025
June 10 – Madrid, Spain @ Sala El Sol
June 12 – Porto, Portugal @ Parque Da Cidade Do Porto
June 14 – Hilvarenbeek, Netherlands @ Best Kept Secret 2025
July 17 - Amagansett, NY - Stephen Talkhouse
July 18 - Hamden, CT - Space Ballroom
July 19 - Woodstock, NY - Levon Helm Studios w/ Cassandra Jenkins
Aug 14 – Ridgefield, CT @ Ridgefield Playhouse w/ Ben Gibbard