“I kept asking myself, ‘What is the song missing?’”
Eric Hutchinson, still looking boyish at 34; wispy blonde hair with a welcoming smile and a shy chuckle, is recounting the somewhat tumultuous past 12-plus months of his life at a café in the West Village. There is something pensive but excitable about him. He is not quite selling me a trite explanation to the random themes I tend to uncover in his new songs; he is revealing them.
“I had to take time off from songwriting for a while,” he continues, poking aimlessly at his light brunch. “When I write the process becomes all encompassing—I mean, it’s really hard for me to have a life. So I have to plan out when I’m going to allow myself to work. I’m always coming up with ideas and lyrics and melodies, but it’s just so exhausting to actually write a song. I start in the morning and then all of the sudden it is six pm and I haven’t eaten or gotten dressed all day and I sort of wander out into the night and I am depleted, because I’ve been screaming and singing all day and I’m losing my brain.”
In all the years I’ve been writing about Hutchinson’s work, across dozens of conversations, some on the record, many not, he has never been more forthcoming on the agonizing effect songwriting has on him. Beyond much of the travails of the past year, some personal, but most professional, he has come to some conclusions about himself and his place in the vastness of the music business. He peppers our discussion with the occasional personal revelation; “I feel like there is a fear of being an adult when you are young and so far I like being an adult better,” he says with a smirk. It is these experiences that form the foundation for his latest batch of funky, poppy, heartfelt songs, Eric Hutchinson is Pretty Good.
The album’s title, which first appeared on a tee shirt he developed in the early days and still sells online and at his shows, along with its playful “selfie” cover, is pure Hutchinson; satirical and self-deprecating. “The title is me being able to look myself in the mirror and feel good about who I am and the music I make. Plus, I find it funny to watch people try to fathom why I’m saying I’m only ‘pretty good’. But that’s just what people say about a band, right? ‘Have you heard ’em? They’re pretty good’.”
Hutchinson, while sufficiently armed with a searing wit, along with a honeyed voice, and some funky stage chops, is a songwriter first and foremost. His three studio albums have spanned the genre of pop/rock; dabbling in soul, funk, reggae, ska, old-time rock and roll, and plain, tried-and-true balladeering. All the while, he’s slowly grown as an artist and a man in a profession rife with eternal youth concerns; approaching each new record as a snapshot in time. Pretty Good is no exception, except this time most of its songs had been completed and considered for release late last year as an EP, providing him a rare period of contemplation and revision. The songs have been well-traveled (he played most of them on tour last year opening for Kelly Clarkson, as well as headlining), eventually being meticulously compiled into full LP (it will even be released on vinyl). Tinkering with the material provided him the opportunity to trade bridges and shift around verses, reconsider lyrics throughout some long nights of “losing my brain.”
“I took time off, away from the songs, and then came back and got to hear them as a fresh listener,” Hutchinson explains. It is something he refers to now as “co-writing with myself”, as the distance between composing and enhancing has its advantages. “It’s like there are times when I don’t listen to music and then I come back and it’s the closest I’ll ever get to listening as somebody else—where I forget exactly how the song is going. Because eventually I learn a song so well that I know it as I should, but I leave it alone and come back to it and try to see… what do I want it to hear?”
A significant part of this process is over the past few months Hutchinson stepped out of his role of songwriter for a while and began sharing the songs that inspired him to become one. This “escape” has led to a moonlighting gig DJing around New York City, something he calls “The Basement”, taken from the title of his song celebrating the early days of soul; Stax to Motown to classic hip-hop; real music, pure music; harmonious and infectious. “I love it, because I allow the music lead me, take me and the crowd to different places,” he says, excitedly. “I don’t know what’s coming up next; I just feel it.”
If there is an overriding theme to Eric Hutchinson’s career, it is his relentless pursuit of the kind of feel-good music that will make his fans dance and sing while managing to ponder the quirks and beauty that comes from fully experiencing life. This journey had come to a crossroads this past year, as he struggled over the decision to change management he has relied on, perhaps too much, for the past decade. Musically, he stripped down his sound and went back to playing clubs without a band, as, he joked, “God intended.”
“I think in a lot of ways this album reminds me of making Sounds Like This,” said Hutchinson, remembering the experience of making his first album, free of expectations, feeling his way. “I think with my first album there was this sense that I got something I want to say and I am just going to do it. And with this album it was the first time where I produced it myself, where I feel like not only do I know what I want to say, but I know how to say it. And…I know how to play it.”
Fully embracing the mantle of producer, Hutchinson was able to exhale, delegating musical and vocal responsibilities to others, which helped him once again step back from the music and see it anew. The result is a collection of penetratingly honest songs; a musical homage to perseverance and maturity brimming with superb melodies and contagious rhythms. It is also a reckoning with the inevitability of Hutchinson’s own evolution.
“Things are gonna change, but change is better than you thought,” he sings in the strikingly confessional “Dear Me” that opens the album, setting the stage for this creative catharsis.
“I see this new album as an embrace of change,” says Hutchinson. “I guess you can say I grew up a traditionalist—sort of worrying about things changing and maybe wanting to keep things the same. But once I realized that things change no matter what, there was a lot of comfort in that; in trying to embrace that immediately and realize that it takes me a little while to get used to things… and then I usually like them.”
As a result of his personal growth, professional turmoil and “embracing change”, Pretty Good is arguably Hutchinson’s most insightful and in some ways autobiographical work, which manages to balance the profound concepts of evolving and acceptance into a relatable sonic expression. “See my reflection now in all of the trends/in isolation with the words of my friends,” he sings with stark resonance in “Bored to Death”, a song that dissects a worldview set against personal introspection.
In fact, each new Hutchinson song is a study in personal, professional and generational divides; including the seemingly airy if not catchy pop of “Lost in Paradise” that speaks to the wanderer in us all, and the album’s first single, “Anyone Who Knows Me”, a wonderfully crafted and stirringly melodic ballad of trying to find love within and without.
Hutchinson also plays with music biz preconceptions, specifically facing the gnawing guilt over his success in “Good Rhythm” or his escaping the shadow of his musical heroes to forge his own unique voice in “Old School”.
“When I was growing up I thought, ‘I’ll never be my heroes’,” he admits. “And with this album it’s like, ‘I don’t want to be my heroes. I want to be me.”
It is about here in the conversation that Hutchinson shares with me a charity he’s embraced called Operation Smile, which reconstructs the lips of effected children in poorer countries. “There’s this guilt that’s attached to feeling like I’ve been successful; I live in a nice apartment in New York and I do what I love to do for a living and I’ve found that when I feel guilty about all this I apply that towards helping other people. It’s really life changing and amazing.”
But perhaps it is the touching “Dear Me” that is Hutchinson’s emotional manifesto on Pretty Good, a musical expedition through time in which an older version of the narrator confides with his younger self about the challenges ahead. He sings, “You’re gonna make mistakes/let ‘em fall behind you/gonna make mistakes, but they won’t define you.”
“I was thinking one day; could I get together with my younger or even older old self and have lunch; would it be a disaster?” chuckles Hutchinson. “’Dear Me’ is writing a song to myself. The idea stuck to me very quickly and really moved me. And it felt like something other people would be able to relate to.”
Hutchinson fully admits Eric Hutchinson is Pretty Good is a chronicle of his maturation. “I became an adult while I was making this album,” he concludes. “I was always thinking, ‘I don’t know how I am going to get there, but I’m just swinging vine to vine and I just know there is going to be another vine and I’ll grab onto that one when I get there.’ And that’s a really freeing and empowering feeling to just kind of feel this confidence of I don’t know what’s going to be next but I’m going to be able to figure it out.”
Facing change, bridging the generational gap, and defining oneself never sounded better.
Eric Hutchinson will be playing at the Trocadero Theatre in Philadelphia on March 8, and Irving Plaza in New York City on March 10 and 11. For more information, go to erichutchinson.com.
