We are giving away a pair of tickets to Fenne Lily / Christian Lee Hutson @ Aladdin Theater on May 16. To win, comment below on this post why you’d like to attend. Winner will be drawn and emailed May 8.
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From our sponsors:
May 16, 2023
Doors 7PM, Show 8PM | $20 | All Ages
More info: event.etix.com
Aladdin Theater
3017 SE Milwaukie Ave, Portland, OR 97202
Fenne Lily opens her third album with a confrontation. At odds with the UK-born, New York-based artist’s dulcet delivery, this acerbic assessment of an intimate situation sets the tone for her new album perfectly. From the first line to the last, Big Picture finds Fenne seeking clarity in the uncertain; comfort in the uncomfortable.
A gorgeous and gripping portrait of Fenne’s last two years, Big Picture was rarely easy for its author to produce but its contents offer a brilliant catharsis. Started haltingly after a period of writer’s block, the songs that would make up her latest work were pieced together over the course of the pandemic, in an effort to self-soothe. “Writing this album was my attempt at bringing some kind of order to the disaster that was 2020,” Fenne states. “By documenting the most vulnerable parts of that time, I felt like I reclaimed some kind of autonomy.”
“This album is an observation of the way I think about love, the self-examination that comes with closeness and the responsibilities involved in being a big part of someone else’s small(er) world,” summarizes Fenne. “It was written in a place of relative emotional stability – stability that felt unstable because of its newness, but also because of the global context. 2020 was the year of letting go, but we’d all already let go of so much and nothing felt like mine anymore. Writing always did, though, so that’s what I chose to do.”
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.
So if every great record is a world, then this is Christian Lee Hutson’s world. 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