I spent $32 to see Christian Lee Hutson and Fenne Lily at the Bluebird Theater last May. I’d seen Hutson once before in a tiny purple-lit venue, enchanted by his impressive fingerpicking and the jarring contrast between his monotone vocal delivery and enthralling glimpses into the vivid, poignant worlds of his characters. Between uncomfortable trails of self-loathing banter and flat jokes, he told stories about old friends, soft-blocked partners, turbulent eldest daughters and amateur photographers struggling to embrace change. When he announced he’d be back in Colorado in less than a year later, I knew I had to go.
He brought with him this time Fenne Lily: a 26-year-old English folk singer sporting a white jumpsuit to match her white electric guitar and the big white banner hung up behind her. In the center of the cloth was a photo of a glass dome harboring a miniature Fenne Lily peeking beneath a lopsided house. Big Picture was the name of the album she was performing. I’d never heard of her before but I felt like I knew her.
Her sophomore album, BREACH (2020), is wacky—it details receiving a severed head as a birthday gift, suffering from an altered perception of self due to social media, trying to rid her clothes of cigarette smoke and ultimately realizing, as a 20-something in this terrifying world, maybe “it’s not hard to be alone anymore” (“Berlin”).
Big Picture (2023) was contrived during the pandemic amidst a creative slump, sprinkled with images of midday’s bright light, in-flight movies and pink porcelain. It’s a lot more reflective and a lot less humorous than BREACH, with no definitive timeline or resolution. Lily’s voice is melancholic in this album, levitating above mellow acoustics to relay a yearning for a different life, different skylines and assurance that she doesn’t have to “get over it at all” (“Dawncolored Horse”).
My favorite song from Big Picture is “In My Own Time.” I didn’t hear it until five months into 2023 and yet it was on top of my Spotify Wrapped. I’m still just as enraptured by its simple yet heart wrenching ode-to-self as I was the first time I heard it: Lily wrote the song about watching the couple next door raise a family during lockdown while she floated around her apartment, feeling stuck and generally unaccomplished. She confesses she often found herself “Listening to [her] neighbors in the garden / Grow their family tree” and that sometimes she felt like she was “just killing time here”–and then ponders: “or maybe it’s killing me.” It’s a slow-paced, grievous reflection, but you can count on Lily for hopefulness. Despite all this doubt, she seems to say, “we’ll be just fine.”
Songs like that make you wonder how many lifetimes Lily’s managed to cram into 26 years; not only is her sagacity evident in introspective approaches to patience and self-compassion, but also in the way she communicates her estrangement from her physical environment. In “Lights Light Up,” she responds cleverly to “Do you ever wanna leave here?” with “That depends on the day” and “Do you even wanna be here?” with “That depends on the way” (a true Aquarius).
The way: that’s what the album is about, really, as obscure as the phrase is. It’s something she promises she’ll never stand in (“Half Finished”) and something that’s almost too nonchalant for such heavy recollections. In “2+2” she remembers a letter being shoved through her door promoting “some guy called Jesus” and that she hung it up on her refrigerator. “Who knows, someday I might need it,” she sighs. Did she ever? We’re left wondering.
I remember listening to these songs periodically, like peeling back the wrapping on a gift following Hutson and Lily’s show. I’d allow myself one on a walk through spring’s enduring fog, another before I called a friend, another as I cleaned my room. A half-year later I still hold this album gently. I feel I might never be finished taking it all in.