VETERAN BRITISH ROCKER PAINTS SONGS WITH WORDS
Latest effort recalls his early acclaimed work with the Soft Boys
Suggesting that Robyn Hitchcock has a way with words is hardly a novel observation at this point.
Now more than 40 years and 21 solo albums into his career, Hitchcock has long maintained a reputation for inventive and often surreal wordplay. But what is a bit surprising is how effortlessly it seems to flow from the 65-year-old singer-songwriter. Even when he is pontificating about something as seemingly banal as the spot of bad weather he endured while on tour in Europe, he has ... well ... a way with words.
“I was in Britain and then I was in Holland, it’s like being in the Arctic,” says Hitchcock, in an interview with Postmedia from the balmy climes of his new home of Nashville. “The air was liquid ice. It didn’t even bother with your flesh, it went straight to your bones. It wrapped itself around your skeleton, in case you forgot you had one.”
The topic does not come out of nowhere. The British singersongwriter seems legitimately concerned when given a weather report for Calgary on this particular morning, which includes what must be the city’s 12th blizzard in a month.
At the very least, the logistics for Hitchcock’s Calgary show at Festival Hall on Friday should be pretty simple, even if Mother Nature refuses to co-operate. Despite the fervent cult following Hitchcock has amassed, the days of “buses and flight cases are long gone,” he says. Hitchcock will be playing acoustic sets by himself, stripping down songs from his vast canon to their elemental bones of words and chords.
As anyone who witnessed Hitchcock play the Calgary Folk Music Festival in 2016 already knows, he is more than capable of commanding a stage by his lonesome. In fact, in some ways, he prefers to work this way.
“Younger people hunt in packs,” Hitchcock says. “Over a certain age, it should be illegal really. People do it out of pride. The only way you can make a living is to get into a band and schlep around Norway
playing old punk songs and sleeping on your grandchildren’s friend’s floors. Or you’re The Rolling Stones.”
That said, he admits his critically acclaimed 2017 self-titled release was sonically designed to sound as if it came from a band. Check out the slinky guitar lines that collide into a power-pop chorus on I Want To Tell You About What I Want; or the garage-rock abandon of Time Coast; or cheerful guitar-pop crunch of Virginia Woolf.
When Nashville musician Brendan Benson, who also plays guitar and keyboards as part of the Jack White-led supergroup The Raconteurs, approached Hitchcock about co-producing an album, he asked him if he would consider making one that hearkened back to the wonderful noise made by the Soft Boys. That was Hitchcock’s pioneering post-punk outfit that produced hugely influential music during its 1976 to 1980 heyday.
Which is not to say that the album is a throwback, at least not in the writing. But Hitchcock didn’t mind the idea of recapturing some of that psychedelic-pop sounds he was known for with the Soft Boys and early solo outings backed by the Egyptians.
“He asked if I could make a record like the Soft Boys days,” he says. “I don’t write the same kind of songs, but with two guitars, bass, drums, harmonies. The classic template. Yet another Beatles’ record. Obviously, there’s a side of me that loves that. So we did and I had a good crop of songs and great musicians.”
Hitchcock has been living in Nashville for the past three years. But he first recorded in Music City nearly 15 years ago. That was when he worked with Americana royalty Gillian Welch and David Rawlings on 2004’s Spooked, a more intimate offering that made good use of Rawling ’s nimble guitar-playing and Welch’s harmony vocals.
On the latest record, Welch returns to add harmonies to the dreamy psychedelic ballad Autumn Sunglasses and also appears in the video. Other guests enlisted for the album include singersongwriter Grant-Lee Phillips, Wilco’s Pat Sansone, Australian singer-songwriter and guitarist Anne McCue and versatile session cellist Emily Nelson.
While the ghosts of Nashville may haunt a few tracks — most notably the galloping, pedal-steeldrenched I Pray When I’m Drunk — Hitchcock was not interested in making a country album.
That song, for instance, was actually written in Oslo.
“The pedal steel is there to give you the context of ‘Oh yeah, well OK, we’re in Nashville,’ ” says Hitchcock. “But it’s not me putting on country robes. I’m not doing an Almost Blue (Elvis Costello’s 1981 album of country covers) or Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline.”
The songs, for the most part, are not about the U.S. but England, even if none were written there, Hitchcock says.
“They seem to be looking at people I knew or knew of in Britain, or people I thought I knew or people I imagined,” he says. “It’s looking at the homeland from overseas. But I spent so much time here and working here, that living here makes sense. I identify as English. I am extremely British. But I probably make more sense over here in this continent than I do where I come from.”
Still, Hitchcock is quick to add that the songs on the self-titled album were all written when Barack Obama was still president and most assumed would be followed by Hillary Clinton. The rapid changes in his adopted country are still something he’s trying to make sense of.
“In some ways, it’s just the extension of something that has already been there,” he says. “It’s the same in Britain. Is it just the alliance of ignorance and money, which is a very powerful and toxic alliance, reasserting itself ? Or is it that life has moved too fast for too many people and they can’t handle the fact that it’s not 1950 anymore, especially if they ’re white and male? I think the rest of us thought we had moved further than we had because we live in very different worlds. I don’t know any Trump voters. I don’t know any Conservatives in Britain. I don’t know anybody who voted for Brexit. I live in my liberal bubble and we run across the other side on Twitter and have our little fights.”
Not that Hitchcock would ever be this straightforward when it comes to his lyrics. “Sinking electricity, I wonder how that feels” he sings in the tender Raymond and the Wires. His words have been described as surreal for so long you might think he would be a little weary of the label. But he doesn’t seem bothered by it in the least.
“My dad was a painter and, yes, I love surrealism,” he says. “To me, surrealism is just putting things where you don’t normally see them. If a giant zucchini suddenly comes down and settles down in this car park in front of me, that is surreal. If a big black 1950s telephone suddenly appears on the roof of the schoolhouse across from me, that is surreal. If my head was replaced by a cat’s head, that’s surreal.
“Yeah, I’m a visual writer. I’ve said this before, I see them as paintings you can listen to. I supposed they are more like surrealist paintings than they are like Rembrandts or Vermeer, some really classy Dutch dude. My stuff is much more 20th century.”
My dad was a painter and, yes, I love surrealism. To me, surrealism is just putting things where you don’t normally see them.