Christian Lee Huston and Pain as a Time Machine - “Quitters” - By Ben Henschel

Image from https://christianleehutson.com/

Join me on an overnight plane, where we can watch everyone contain their own chaos and you can watch me almost fail at containing my own. 

Look first to my left — see all the rings on the mother’s fingers and the absence of one where it would’ve held significance. Her kid is scratching his arms raw. That Sprite can teeters on the edge of the tray table and her other kid’s swinging their iPad way too close to it. The third kid cracks open a Ziploc and the stench is almost solid. 

I move my eyes to my lap, where my headphones are. I need to listen to Quitters, the new album from my favorite songwriter, but I can’t stop running from thoughts I ought to confront. I want distraction from recent pain. 

The third kid had to have known this. 

“Are you gonna eat those peanuts?” he said to me, across the aisle. 

The mother and I smile at each other and I fork the Delta snack over to him before she can apologize. I held a kind glance to her that I hoped would spark some conversation, even if it was a ten-second exchange. I needed to be pulled out of my head and into some small talk. She said thank you with endearment, and then dealt with the firestorm of the three boys. Somehow, she had it all together. 

And so now I really have to listen to Quitters, despite knowing very well what Christian Lee Hutson’s words will do to a person with something like grief on their hands. I gauge the cabin for characters as a final effort to avoid it and find none. The plane revs up and we jolt forward. 

***

I want to be clear that Christian Lee Hutson is probably my favorite artist and certainly my favorite songwriter. My attempts to wriggle out of listening to Quitters has nothing to do with enjoyment and everything to do with confrontation. 

Hutson is an artist of memory. His first album, Beginners, begins like this: 

On our initial descent into Chicago 

Katie leans over my lap 

Looking out the window 

For a glimpse of the house we were kids in 

She says, “I hated it then, but now I kind of miss it” 

Shirts in the microwave, trash in the sink 

Quarters in a mason jar for every time she smokes 

She says, “If we keep this up, girls, in no time we’ll be broke.” 

Inclusions don’t seem random. He spends all of his time showing and almost none of it telling, so you take something away that feels personal. You hear “shirts in the microwave” and “quarters in a mason jar” and see something from a few years ago. And that thought could lead you to thank someone silently or dial someone up or even just cry. 

And this is all to say that I think Christian Lee Hutson is too damn good to handle in an emotional crisis — I was too far gone to listen. 

I’ll reveal myself a bit: something I do on planes is stumble into old pain. Funerals, heartbreak, regret. It happens if I don’t fill my mind with music or something to watch or read. I stumbled before I listened to Quitters. I saw regret and frustration and the hope for an apology you won’t get, but also somehow the urge to apologize for even wanting one. Then I thought about death in general and my comfortability in the headspace. I was looking for pain, and as it turned out so was Hutson. He actually sort of had my back. 

“Pain is a way you can move through time / And visit people that are gone in your mind / And smooth over every wrinkle you find / The truth can’t hurt you if you know it’s a lie.” (Strawberry Lemonade) 

This is a main point of Quitters — some sense that emotional pain is to be avoided, but inevitable pain is more complicated. Say I’m deflated, thinking about a loved one who isn’t alive anymore and the time we spent. The path to those memories has mandatory stops, the part of the retrieval process where we search for one thing and inevitably land somewhere else. The path to missing them is riddled with the smiles you shared and the real moments that made you. 

I’m more comfortable confronting old pain after Quitters. Let yourself think of a lost friend, and you might unearth a hidden memory. That memory might lead to other characters, who become just a text away from a reclaimed connection. Just as well—think of a beautiful day with your best friends and a football, and you might remember how impossible it felt to get out of bed that semester. 

Quitters clues you in that we might be looking toward the more painful of Hutson’s memories and dreams, but you wouldn’t know it if he didn’t tell you. He goes about proving this pain-as-a-time-machine theory by crafting each song around the warmest corners of memory. 

“Used to squint at my palm and say ‘long life ahead of you’ / Then spit in my hand and add ‘also a swimming pool’ / Joked that you already knew you were next / In a long line of people who just never left this town.” (Sitting Up With a Sick Friend) 

What do you see? I see a sting of reality at the end, but one that shouldn’t be taken without the palm reading and how that small moment of humor and connection stuck with him. Those moments inevitably behave like trees on a time lapse, stretching out to grant you other treasures. I remember my mom and I screaming at each other at our weakest moments. And then I find gold and parts of myself in her favorite old movie a year later, thankful that our shouts weren’t the last words. 

Hutson wants to go away to a “St. Louis basement making trains race,” he isn’t happy for the moment. And then we look back with him to “playing Nintendo, floating paper lanterns past your window.” And this leads him to the mini-epiphany: “I know that things have been slow, hope they pick up soon.” 

I still see pain, and we’re supposed to. He might’ve seen pain as the time in between the Nintendo and things that’ve “been slow,” time he wished he would’ve reached out to her or made a better effort. We’ll always see pain and regret like this, big or small—if anything here is true, it’s this. But I almost see luxury in the pursuit, sometimes the fight, to look left and right for the beautiful little moments that ground us in otherwise harsh circumstances. 

Please know this isn’t a suck-that-old-pain-up argument. Pain isn’t a feeling to chase and when it feels like one, we owe it to ourselves to lean on our people. But, despite our best efforts, pain finds a way back to us. When you take time out and let a trip to the reality and bitterness of your past simmer, letting the paths you walked and the people you walked them with materialize, you might recover the warmth that came first or long afterward. Little traditions and bracelets and toys find their back into your history. Pain acts like a currency instead of a terror. 

I could be lying to myself, “smooth[ing] over every wrinkle” of my past, like Hutson says. And I might be getting Hutson wrong here. But treating pain like a road trip with tens of stops is almost lovely—they might be gone, but the scent of peppermint and cigarettes still finds its way home. 

The people you miss emerge through the act of confronting loss in long retrospect. I hear old piano notes and prank a little tonic water into my older cousin’s cup with my then-little hands and find my tears from ten years ago and the remarkable great grandfather that died and the lessons that didn’t die and “Taps” from French horns and a caravan of dress blues at Arlington and more tears and the weight of high expectations and the persistence to meet them and— 

I think Hutson’s right about this. I sink back and see myself drop a chunk of sandwich into my lap years ago and snack it down before my mom can see there’s a stain — she used to hate it when I’d do that. I take off my headphones and realize I was just watching the family to my left. Maybe it’s more than a time machine. 

Image from https://christianleehutson.com/