Twenty-four year-old Carter Hudson is a musician and songwriter known during non-COVID times for his weekly performances at The Drinkery, a bar located in Spokane’s historic Garland District. His submission to this year’s NPR Tiny Desk Contest is an intimately shot video featuring Hudson alone in his bedroom, surrounded by guitars. The lyrics to the song, titled “I Can’t Hear You Anymore,” are personal.
“It’s a song that means a lot to me. It’s about my grandmother. She died when I was ten. And I realized I couldn’t hear her in my memory anymore. I could still see her, but for whatever reason, I think grief is just this weird thing that at least for me is certainly not linear. It ebbs and flows. So yeah, it’s a song sort of dedicated to her, about her.”
Originally from Southern California, Hudson moved to Spokane in 2014 to attend Whitworth University. After graduating, he stuck around, in part because of the community of musicians.
“I really like the music scene here. I think over the last ten or so months, I’ve tried to immerse myself more in the scene. It is, I guess, fairly small when you compare it to a city like Seattle or Portland or something, somewhere else in the Northwest. But I enjoy the fact that us musicians know each other. We respect each other. We like to play together. So I’ll often sit in with other groups or have them come sit in with me. So yeah, it feels very ‘Spokane’ in that it’s not trying to be anything other than what it is.”
Like many musicians, Hudson has been looking for ways to connect with that community in the age of social distancing.
“Yeah, so I did Instagram Live for a little bit, every week. And that was good. I did that for, I don’t know, maybe six, seven weeks. But it’s just a weird space. You don’t see your audience, and so that for me is . . . I don’t know, it’s just really hard to connect. Yeah, I eagerly await trying to play shows again, even though I think it’s going to be sort of a weird transition back to that and what that looks like.”
For now, you can find Carter Hudson’s music on Instagram at Carter S. Hudson, on Spotify or Apple Music, and of course, at the NPR Music Tiny Desk Contest page, where you can see video submissions from independent artists all across the country. Click here to watch Carter Hudson's full YouTube video submission.
