Pure Fiction is Eric Hutchinson's elegy to pop music, a place to fit all those melodies that are so comforting in their immediate hook you could swear you've heard them before. Someone must have already raised the gospel pleading of "Forever" or the choral Na-Na's that herald "Tell The World", the record's first single. It is a striking prologue to the album's underlying theme - holding onto the best moments in life and shamelessly shouting it from a mountain top.
"I live in constant social media, sharing in this world of endless best moments. Nobody, including me, ever seems to post their bad day online. 'Tell The World' is kinda a jab at that, but also it's that celebration we feel when we want to share the best things in life."
Freeing his mind, getting back to basics and collaborating produced an evocative pallet for Hutchinson, borne from his recent travels of leisure, specifically the breathtaking city of Barcelona. Set against experiences from a wave of touring over the years, this global view is made manifest in Pure Fiction. "The more places you go the more you realize the same things matter to everybody," Hutchinson says, recalling his "inspiration wall", a shrine to creativity he hung above his humble workspace; photos, paintings, and postcards.
The "inspiration wall" can be heard in the nearest Hutchinson has come to a ballad, "Sun Goes Down"; mixing another mother of a melody with striking lyrical imagery. "I found this old postcard from the 1950's and hung it on my wall. One day I was looking at it and wondering what the story was behind it. So I wrote one for it." To Hutchinson, the postcard is a metaphor for the captured moments of Pure Fiction: "On the front a desert sky orange, red and brown/ She wrote will you think of me/When the sun goes down."
The journey to Hutchinson's spiritual center is infused in the achingly infectious "Love Like You" with its subtle tensions that draws the listener to the lyric through an almost hypnotic vocal performance. The subtle duplicitous lines like "This is a crash landing, we're living a dream" hint at Hutchinson's playful seduction of how much these moments of happiness are the result of blind chance.
Beneath the evolution of Hutchinson as a composer and recording artist is an awareness of his second love beyond creation, performing. That love is the nucleus of Pure Fiction, a celebration of the perfect moment between artist and audience. "When we're the in the moment, the audience and I, and I'm lost in the song, it's as good as it was before or will ever be," he says. "It's the reason I picked up the guitar in the first place - you play that chord and you sing and it's harmony in the real sense of the word, like everything makes sense, and nothing else matters. That's music to me on its gut level; listening to a perfect song or writing a moving lyric or singing a golden melody; time stops, and I'm very lucky I get to do that for a living."