Robyn Hitchcock (Interview)

“I guess I swapped my parents and my family for Bob Dylan,” says Robyn Hitchcock, remembering an evolutionary moment in his creative journey. “I just heard “Like a Rolling Stone” every day for two months as I was going into my teens, it was my kind of bar mitzvah really. My molecular structure was changed over the course of 18 months and by the end of 1967 when I had gone through the change, and I was like a sort of skinny, dark haired version of what I am now I was writing the lyrics and I’d got a guitar. My parents, for their sins, gave me a cheap acoustic guitar. I just took it everywhere with me like a few years earlier I would have taken my little panda teddy bear. I would always go everywhere with a plastic dinosaur in my pocket — I was a very OCD kid who wanted their comfort. And I just replaced that with the guitar and my Bob Dylan records and my portable record player. By the time I was 15 I haven’t consciously decided it, but there was nothing else I wanted to do.” In episode 146, hear the legendary singer-songwriter share more about his love for Dylan, his adolescent musical awakening, connecting with an attraction to art that is absurd or surreal, how he began writing songs and the discoveries that led to his work with The Soft Boys, insights into how his approach to music has changed and how he lets the songs find him, like birds finding seed. We also talk about his new album, The Confuser, his latest memoir, Stranded in The Future, and more! Robyn is on tour in Europe this month. Get tickets here.