Robyn Hitchcock – Shufflemania!

756

From B.B. Blackberry and the Swelterettes to Maureen and the Meat Packers, not to mention The Soft Boys, The Egyptians and a solo career, the slightly twisted mind of Robyn Hitchcock has spawned an amazing body of work and Shufflemania! is no exception. It teases, turns and twirls to its own muse, one that Hitchcock was having trouble locating. Since 2017, his muse was nowhere to be found, but on a 2019 trip to the Mayan ruins at Tulum, Mexico during the Winter Solstice, the two began dancing in the dust of the Yucatec Maya, eventually leading to “The Feathery Serpent God,” followed by nine more.

However, giving birth to this collection was not as easy as it might seem. After a four-year creative hiatus, Hitchcock was haunted by the lockdown instead of locusts. Rather than get bogged down, he began sending his rhythm guitar parts and scratch vocals to friends far and wide. Some were no-brainers. “The Inner Life of Scorpio” went to Johnny Marr, who just happens to be a Scorpio. Adding drums, piano, acoustic guitar and bass, the song then got sent off to Anne Lise Frøkedal in Oslo, who added harmonies.

Wilco’s Pat Sansone worked on a number of songs, while Brendan Benson who produced Hitchcock’s 2017 album plays most of the instruments on “The Shuffle Man and “The Sir Tommy Shovell,” a song about an imaginary English Pub. As he recalls, “Brendan said he wanted to try to make it sound like The Soft Boys. So I thought, ‘Oh right, well, I’ll contact Kimberley Rew who, you know, was in The Soft Boys, and ask him if he’d play some guitar on it.’ So it went over to Cambridge, and Kim played guitar.”

As a songwriter, part of what makes Hitchcock so unique is that he doesn’t write songs like anyone else on the planet. When was the last time you heard a song devoted to Socrates as he was facing execution? Making the song even more memorable is a final verse, “Plus a little ship of wisdom/ On a lake of instant fools/ Plus any executioner/ He’ll say ‘I don’t make the rules'”.

Having jammed with Sean Lennon in the past, Hitchcock asked him to play on “One Day (It’s Being Scheduled),” a track that has echoes of John’s “Imagine.” Rather than merely playing the drums, Lennon added vocoder, marimba, tropical sounds and a bit of bass to the song. With lyrics like, “One day/ The color of your skin won’t be the great divide/ And one day you’ll care how other people feel inside,” you begin to understand why the track made so much sense for Lennon.

Thank heaven that Robyn Hitchcock ran into Kukulkan, aka Quetzalcoatl, the feathery serpent god while in Tulum. Without that chance encounter, we may have never had Shufflemania! We are so much richer due to that chance encounter.