Caleb Lee Hutchinson
Caleb Lee Hutchinson
Long Line of Losers
There’s a Nineties country revival going on in Nashville these days, but don’t look for Caleb Lee Hutchinson in that crowd. The Dallas, Georgia, native finds his inspiration in the vintage sounds of an earlier decade.
“When people refer to classic country, they're often not going that far back,” Hutchinson says. “I want to pay proper homage to a specific era, while also making it my own, and recording what I believe to be the best era of country music. People love the Nineties right now — and I do too — but I’m asking, ‘What about the Seventies?’”
Those Seventies vibes — easygoing twang, barroom rhythms, and self-mythologizing lyrics — form the basis of Hutchinson’s new album Long Line of Losers. Reuniting with producer Titanic Sinclair, who oversaw Hutchinson’s 2023 debut, Southern Galactic, the singer-guitarist celebrates mistakes, mess-ups, and near misses over 12 stone-cold-country tracks.
“I thought I run out of mistakes to make/this one takes the cake,” he sings in the rollicking title track about a night spent in jail. “Shaking the bars, ‘Can’t you tell I’m a star? Come on, man, give me a break!’” It’s disarmingly self-aware and plays up Hutchinson’s gift for winking at his own image. Yes, he acknowledges, he was on that TV show, but his moment in the pop-culture spotlight doesn’t define him.
Long Line of Losers, an album that puts Hutchinson alongside influences like Sturgill Simpson and Jamey Johnson, is the proof.
The idea of home turns up often on the album, whether it’s the family lineage he parodies in “Long Line of Losers” — based on something his dad once said to comfort him after a stinging loss — or the actual hometown he tries to flee in the snaking “Dallas.” Once again, it finds Hutchinson aspiring to a higher station in life, one where he’s buying a palace, drinking from a chalice, and he “ain’t in Dallas no more.”
That diverse mix of sounds is what gives Long Line of Losers its edge. Whether Hutchinson is lamenting lonely weekends in the clever “Sadder Days” (say it out loud…), dropping rapid-fire verses in the high-octane “Pull a Fast One,” or delivering a cutting ballad in “Cowboy Killer,” he never forsakes his grit. Even if, he admits, he leads a relatively chill existence: “The warrior in the garden” lifestyle, Hutchinson calls it.
There is an irony to Long Line of Losers, however. With a batch of terrific songs and hard-won music industry experience under his belt, Hutchinson finds himself set up for a winning streak. He’s ready for it.
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