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obyn hitchcock has seen his swells , his sleet , his swashbuckling. He’s been both the eye of the hur- ricane and its focal point. He’s hunkered down and he’s ridden it out. And if not for this extremely pliable metaphor—that of The Tempest Issue—he’d be quite the chap to try and muster up justice-serving words about. See, Robyn Hitchcock is a weathervane of surrealism. His songwriting is both divine and dutifully dubitable, tragicomic and transient. Conscientious of his imprint, yet modest of his granularity in the larger cosmos, the man is self-effacing yet si- multaneously self-emancipating in his multitudinousness. His is a legacy quite hard to pin, yet delicious with which to listen. But why the struggle to describe this particular human? Be- cause Robyn Hitchcock makes one feel so many things: that the imagination can tunnel through the molten core of the earth, or the heart, and come out the other side with lapels pressed and revelations liberated; that childlike curiosity is a noun, a thing, not a temporal ascription, and it’s yours if you don’t let the em- bers cool; that love is a steely sorcerer, all that we’re really made of, and it’s sometimes best unpacked in song. Hitchcock is indeed many things. Poet, charmer, singer, writer, painter, journeyman, maverick, trickster, entertainer— and a six decade career, annexed across uncountable live shows and some thirty records, compounds this. And now, we’re for- tunate that, after a five year pause in publishing—the longest ever for the artist—he’s dropped a new record on us that’s load- ed with the suspected whimsy and irreverence, and of course, heft and a sort of herculean sincerity we’ve come to know him for. SHUFFLEMANIA! (Tiny Ghost Records) is just under 40 elegantly-laced minutes and includes contributions from a vast swathe of cultural heartbeats, friends from past and present. Here, we talk the characters unearthed on the record, who may or may not possess quite the same ventricles as the album con- tributors, but who steer the ship with poise nonetheless. We talk forced stillness.We talk adaptation, uptake, AI, shock versus slow burn, and the imperative of quests small and large. This is The Tempest Issue, Robyn. How do you feel SHUFFLE- MANIA! was informed by the natural elements? Or was it? I think that’s why we’re emotional—we grow up on a planet with weather systems. So you know: the tempest, the calm, the stasis, the sudden gusts, the becalmed moments that sometimes steal across life when you don’t seem to be going anywhere… equilibrium itself, which is really hard to find, and then sometimes boredom—all of this seems to be from weather conditions. Would you liken the new record to a ‘weather event’ of some sort, then? The record itself, the songs themselves, seem to be an eruption of sub-personalities, which came out of me after about three years of not coming up with really much in the way of finished songs. Suddenly, the songs started finishing themselves with some urgency. Whether this was an unconscious intuition of the pandemic coming down, or whether it was something else in the climate…I mean, you could argue that as the climate is now a gun to our head—or the climate has our gun to its head—there’s greater urgency in what we all do, you know? There are so many things that seem like deadlines coming up before us as a species. So does today’s creativity then, by necessity, need to become more eruptive? I think everything does. Even going to buy yogurt in the corner store is going to have to be a bit more eruptive. You can’t say, ‘Well, I might leave it ’til next year,’ you know? Everything has become more urgent. But I’m also 70 next year, so the amount of time left to me is more obviously finite. I don’t spend that much time in front of the mirror, but I see my friends getting old. And I also live a kind of artificially youthful lifestyle. In this business, you need to grow up, but you have to kind of pretend you haven’t. In certain ways, you’re supposed to be
forever young. But nonetheless, for me, yeah, I do have to get out what I can get out. Is urgency something new to you, or it’s a familiar feeling? I’ve always been pretty urgent. I mean, everyone I know who writes songs—it’s their kind of quest. In a way, we’re all acting as if it’s still the 1970s. You know, ‘the goal in life is to make a series of albums,’ and most of us have long fulfilled that dream. Whether you’re right up at the top, or just kind of, you know, people like me, or my East Nashville buddies. I mean, they’re all churning stuff out at different speeds. We’re all doing the standard animal reaction, just doing what we do, like birds building nests on doors that are floating down a river or something, just trying to create something solid, even in an incredibly transitionary state. And how about these sub-personalities on the record you speak about? Oh, there’s a whole bunch of them. There’s The Shuffle Man himself, who is sort of trickster, possibly a Gemini, sits at both sides of the table at once, deals cards—take three, throw them up in the air, and then you have to figure out what to do with them, the sort of extremely capricious nature of fate—which of course we saw happening a lot in 2020. And then there’s this feathery serpent god who was based on a Mexican Mayan deity. A winged serpent who’s actually, interestingly enough, god of storms and rain, but also life—the way that those old gods sort of almost have arbitrary portfolios, you know? ‘Well, I’m rain and storms, but I’m also life.’ I think the serpent god represents basically the life force, whatever it is—the urgency of existence. One set of circumstances driving another set of circumstances off the map and saying, ‘Okay, this is what it’s like now.’ In a way, they both have to do with adaptability. Shuffling the hand they’re dealt so to speak… There’s also a Scorpio detective. Scorpios are meant to be good detectives, surgeons, spies, apparently, psychologists. You know, they go deep into the intricate, dark side of things and people. And then there’s the sort of noir person who isn’t real- ly a detective. They’re more on the run, but they’re in a crime scene. They might even be hunted by the Scorpio Detective. Then there’s the Raymond Chandler figure in “The Man Who Loves the Rain,” which is titled after an unwritten Chandler story. I mean, there’s obviously a lot of detection stuff going on there. And then there’s the sort of posh Old English Lord—Sir Tommy Shovell —definitely my sort of ancestral posh British archetype. Very distinguished. And then there’s Socrates, who is put to death for not toeing the party line, and thinking too far out of the box. I don’t know if they’re all my sub-personali- ties—they’re sub-personalities that I found. They’re maybe not you, but you’ve unquestionably encoun- tered them. What did you emotionally encounter in that time of incompletion, when the songs weren’t finishing? Was it depressing? I think it was frustrating from an artistic point of view. But per- sonally, I was busy, I was touring. Me and Emma [Swift; part- ner, musician, and Tiny Ghost Records lead] seem to have been everywhere in the world, twice a year. That may have affected my ability to finish things off. I think also, unfortunately, to bring politics into it again, the British Brexit vote, and then the 2016 US election, and the way that went, were both things that would have seemed impossible—even six months before—and they were terrible. To me, I felt rather dwarfed, you know? You felt a futility in the face of what was happening? I thought Mondo Hitchcock really doesn’t amount to a hill of beans in the overall picture—and I’m pretty self-absorbed, I’m in my own ‘me sphere,’ my ‘me—osphere,’ whatever. And so, they say write about what you know… so basically, my psycho- logical landscape is where my songs are largely set, because that’s the thing I’m most likely to be true about. But I just felt
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