On February 6, 2020, Christian Lee Hutson released the video for “Lose This Number,” ahead of the release of his first solo album, Beginners, which was to follow a few months later. He told Stereogum that he saw the song as being “about someone fixating on the past.”
Meanwhile, a filmmaker named Tyler Gillett, whom Hutson didn’t know but would soon meet, was very much fixated on the past.
Specifically, he was fixated on a song from the past. It was a song he remembered from his early high school years of the late-1990s, and he could remember it in fairly vivid detail: the catchy flute line in the intro, many of the rapid-fire lyrics in the verse, and the triumphant-sounding chorus. He described the mystery song as a cross between Barenaked Ladies and U2.
The only problem was that nobody else remembered it. His wife didn’t recognize it. Neither did his friends. Neither, after hours of Googling, did the internet. How could a song Tyler had heard so many times in his youth, often enough to memorize large chunks of it and remember the instrumentation, not be found anywhere online?
On February 16, 2020, Tyler Gillett got in touch with the Reply All podcast with his desperate plea for help. The show’s co-host at the time, PJ Vogt, set out on a quest to identify the song that had been stuck in Tyler’s head.
To help in their mission, Vogt reached out to some musician friends to try and re-create the song. Using a crude acapella version Tyler had recorded, and with Tyler himself calling the shots in the studio, they conjured the music out of Tyler’s memory as if trying to paint images from someone’s recurring dream.
Recruited to sing the re-constructed mystery song: Christian Lee Hutson.
The resulting episode, “The Case of the Missing Hit” became one of the most acclaimed and beloved podcast episodes of 2020, and might be my favourite episode of all time. It was released a week before COVID was declared a pandemic, and I think I’ll always remember listening to it as the last moment of joy I experienced before everything changed.
If you haven’t listened to it already, I kind of have to insist that you do it now. It’s great storytelling, and manages to incorporate ideas about obsession, memory, and 90s nostalgia without compromising the story’s momentum.
And, as a nice little bonus, it introduced me to the music of Christian Lee Hutson.
What makes this a beautiful song:
1. The contrast between the intimacy of the guitar and the grandiosity of the string arrangement.
2. The lyrics; they touch on those same themes of memory, searching, and obsession: Bobby helped me track you down ‘cause / I just saw your name in the paper / You said of course that reminded you of me / Don’t you know that’s how a name works?
3. The background vocals, by Phoebe Bridgers, are so quiet they’re barely there; as if they are a memory projected outwards by the lead singer.
Recommended listening activity:
Trying to remember your childhood phone numbers.