Phillyist Interviews... Eric Hutchinson

Last time we saw you, within days, Perez Hilton gave you that nod on his site, and all of a sudden, you're one of the top downloaded artists on iTunes and you had 3000 MySpace friend requests in one day. Was that totally overwhelming?
It was weird. I sort of look at the MySpace page as homework, like even when I have everything else done, there are always MySpace messages to go check. And I really do appreciate people writing them. My main problem is more with MySpace, which is a really clunky format I think, and it takes a long time to respond to people. Compared to an ordinary e-mail format like Gmail, I could do five e-mails in the time it takes me to write one MySpace message.

So did you know that Perez was going to mention you?
Yeah, I got tipped off two days beforehand. But I really was not prepared for how I was going to be affected. Actually Perez wasn't either, because he's put other people up there and there hasn't ever been sort of a reaction like there was to me, so... It was cool.

Have you guys met in person?
Yeah, we've met a few times, and we still e-mail. He's been nothing but great to me, and it's really nice. I've been playing for a long time and I was always sort of waiting for someone to take me under their wing. I never thought it would be him, but it's just been nice to have somebody recognize what I've been doing.

After the Perez Hilton thing, it was said of you: "Few stories underscore the radical changes experienced by the post-millennial music industry than that of Eric Hutchinson." Do you think that the Internet makes music distribution and sales more egalitarian, so that it doesn't matter so much if you're signed to a major label?
Yeah, I think so. I mean... I will preface this by saying that we're getting pretty close to signing with a major label actually. (Author's Note: The label in question was Warner Brothers, which, ironically, had dumped Eric through its Maverick imprint last year.) But I think Perez is a great example, where we had the link, and it goes so quickly from looking at something to being able to buy it. Like, if you read an article in a newspaper, you have to make a mental note, then remember to go find it on Amazon.com or in the CD store, and good luck finding one, and then you forget. Whereas on a blog, you click on something, you like it, you buy it. It's so much faster.

So moving away from your Internet fame and getting back to your music, could you tell us a bit about your musical training?
Ummm...

Or lack thereof.
Yeah, I really don't have much. I took piano lessons when I was a kid for a little bit. And that's about it, really. I've just been doing this a long time, and it's a lot of self-taught stuff. I have a lot of bad habits and a lack of skills in a lot of places where I should be a lot better. But I always considered myself a songwriter first and a singer second, and a guitar and piano player a distant third. It's always been just a means to the end of writing songs.

So do the lyrics then usually come first?
No, melody is almost always first. I'm always on the lookout for a topic of a song, or a phrase of a song. I always like to have a couple ideas stored up so that when a melody comes along, I have something to write about.

A lot of your songs sound like really fun, happy, upbeat songs, but then you start to listen to the lyrics and all of a sudden you realize that with songs like "Oh!" or "Food Chain," there's actually something much more serious at the core. How do you reconcile the disparity between really fun, poppy music and the more serious issues that you sometimes touch on?
I appreciate you noticing that, because I get a lot of people sending MySpace messages saying "Your music just makes me happy," which is awesome because for a long time I was sort of melancholy, sort of a shoegazer, and it took me a long time to get my music to where I wanted it to be. But I sort of like that. It allows me to feel like I'm getting away with it. Having that poppy side sort of tricks people into listening to what you want to say. If you get them to hum along to it, you can sing pretty much anything. And a good example of that, I'm not a crazy Bruce Springsteen fan, but the song "Dancing in the Dark"—that song is so happy and it's got maybe the most depressing lyrics ever. But I'm trying to do that even more.

You've been on the road a lot. Do you get to do any writing on the road, or do you save it until you're home and have time to yourself?
Yeah, it's pretty difficult. Especially with us, we don't have a tour bus, just a van. Sometimes, when you have a tour bus, there's a space in the back where you can go off by yourself. But I've had almost no time. But I have been, as I said earlier, making a collection of phrases and ideas. I look at songwriting kind of like being an author, where you need to just have an entire day to focus on it. Like any other routine, you have to get up and just do it for a while every day, so it's hard. And it's frustrating, too. I'm a big believer that when I can't write something, the best thing to do is to stop trying to write, and then life experience makes you want to write more. Like, the song "Oh!" came out of nowhere really. I'd been traveling and doing a bunch of stuff... a lot of the situations [in "Oh!"] are kind of exaggerations of things that happened.

So when you hit one of those writer's block moments and need to walk away, when you're not writing or performing music, what do you do?
Worry about the fact that I'm not writing. I'm usually convinced that I'm not going to write another song ever again. But I'm a big fan of fantasy basketball and baseball. I spend a lot of time doing that. Play backgammon. Actually, the album cover is kind of a collection of the things I was doing during that time. I'm a big believer that a record should be a time capsule of where you were at that time, so I put all those things on the cover. Also, the title of the album is sort of a play on words. It's "Eric Hutchinson Sounds Like This," but it's also, Eric Hutchinson sounds like fantasy basketball and the Winter Olympics and sushi and backgammon...

Is the time capsule mentality why songs like "Breakdown More" didn't make it onto the album?
Yeah. I sort of like to talk about songs like... I guess the analogy is like clothing that people have. "Breakdown More" I wrote like eight years ago. People are like, "Why don't you play 'Breakdown More?'" And it's like, "Well, why don't you wear that shirt you were wearing eight years ago?" It made sense at the time, but it doesn't make sense now. I still play the one live cause it gets good feedback, and I don't hate it or anything. It's just that there's newer stuff that I'm more excited about.

Are there any songs that you get tired of playing?
I try not to record those songs. And if I'm even sort of annoyed with a song, I try not to push it even further along. There's no song on the album that I'm really sick of at this point or anything. I think maybe the song that's the hardest to get through is "Outside Villanova" for some reason. I don't know why it is.

Is it based on a true story?
Not really. It's based on what could have been a true story. There was a weird girl that had this crush on me at the Bryn Mawr show who was freaking me out, and it's a story about what would've happened.

Where in Bryn Mawr was that show?
That was at The Point, when that was still there.

Last question, if you were stuck on a desert island, what five albums would you have to have with you?
You know, I think about that all the time. What are yours? [Phillyist stammers to answer the question.] I think would take Graceland by Paul Simon. Abbey Road. Ummm... I don't know. Maybe Fulfillingness' First Finale by Stevie Wonder. Maybe Billy Joel's Greatest Hits, the double-disc. And I'd like to get some rap in there too. You know, if we were really going to dig into this and just have five albums, I'd probably want a little bit of each. Nat King Cole's Midnight Sessions is a great album. And the Charlie Brown Christmas album... not even just for Christmas, it's just one of my favorite albums.

Thanks Eric.
Thanks guys. (Author's Note: Right after the recorder went off, Eric exclaimed something along the lines of: "Thriller! Michael Jackson's Thriller. I can't believe I forgot that one. Please put it on the list, too." We're happy to oblige.)

Marié Digby & Eric Hutchinson, with Jason Nozuka
TONIGHT, Wed., 5/28/08
Doors 6:00 p.m., show 7:30 p.m.
World Cafe Live, 3025 Walnut St.
Tickets: $16 (standing room only; reserved seats sold out)

Image by author.