ROBYN HITCHCOCK - THE CONFUSER - TINY GHOST

In his sixth decade as a singer, songwriter, and musician, Robyn Hitchcock manages to still illuminate and mystify, bemuse and philosophize, unlike any other before or since. Hitchcock’s 25th solo studio album and first collection of all-new original songs in close to four years, The Confuser, sees the legendary British art rocker operating at the peak of his substantial powers on a dazzlingly dynamic collection of typically perceptive new songs that traverse familiar signposts near and dear to his creative heart – the significance of love, the mysteries of the cosmos, and all the abstract accidents that happen between the luck of birth and the bitter end. From the ebulliently self-anthemic “I Am This Thing” and characteristically skewed “My Dead Astronaut” to the jaunty music hall psychedelia of the album-closing “Wasted,” The Confuser offers a singularly Hitchcockian masterclass in matching spry musicality with potentially grim subject matter, demonstrating his still irrepressible spirit in the face of dire times and impending disaster both personal and universal.

“When times get questionable and despair is poking its head up over the hill and leering at everybody you really do need to rock,” Hitchcock says. “It’s no good producing handwringing music, like Oh God, this is awful. Of course it’s awful. Every day is a challenge, man. If you look at it like that, it’s wonderful. If you don’t, it’s just an endless barrage of intimidation and terror and insult.”

Recorded at studios in Hitchcock’s longtime home base of Nashville USA by Brad Jones (Chuck Prophet, Jill Sobule, Matthew Sweet), The Confuser features crack accompaniment from Music City session experts including electric guitarist Jeremy Fetzer (Steelism, Lambchop, Kesha), bass guitarist Todd Bolden, and drummer/percussionist Eric Slick (Dr. Dog, Adrian Belew, Taylor Swift). Special guests include cherished friends Gillian Welch (contributing vocals to “Ghost in Sunlight”) and Kimberley Rew (co-founder, with Hitchcock, of The Soft Boys), who lends additional guitar to “Breathless,” “How To Feel Alright,” “Ghost in Sunlight,” and “Building From The Ruins.” 

“These guys make it easy for me to just go in there and kick it along,” says Hitchcock. “They’re really quick. Nashville cats are like that. You just walk in and they chart the thing. It sounds like you’ve been playing together for six months, but you’ve actually only just met. Ever since Dylan did Blonde on Blonde here, people in the rock community have realized what a great place this is to make rock records.

“Interestingly, Jeremy, Eric, and Todd are all born under the sign of Taurus,” he adds. “They’re the Nashville bulls. I don’t call them that because it makes them sound like a baseball team and I’m sport free, but they are, indeed, three Taureans. What are the chances of that?”

The enthusiastically head-on backing propels what might be Hitchcock’s most buoyant batch of songcraft in some time, imbuing a robust exuberance to crooked blues a la the Soft Boys (“How To Feel Alright,” “Building From The Ruins”), full-bore riff pop (“Yesterday’s Rain”), cantering folk-rock (“Monday For Me”), and even signature autumnal moments like “Breathless” and “The Vanishing Kind.” However, like much of his beloved body of work thus far, the themes are in fact somewhat disconsolate, utilizing the restorative, endlessly hopeful possibilities of guitar music to do poetic battle with our categorically transient mortality and the innumerable “catastrophes that that make up a human life.”

“This record seems to be about disintegration,” Hitchcock says. “I’m glad that it feels so peppy, but actually, the common theme seems to be things falling apart and, I suppose on a positive note, what remains when things have fallen apart. What are the bones revealed when the flesh comes off?

“It’s constant, really. Things just keep falling apart and regrouping. The news of the day is always bad. It always has been. The first thing I can remember, news-wise, is the Cuban Missile Crisis. So there’s been, like, 65 years of doom, and it’s as bad now as it’s ever been. But we’re still here.”

A working artist throughout most of that extinction era, Hitchcock is very much still here. Seemingly indefatigable, he spends much of his time on the road, performing solo or backed by different combos of local friends and musicians, is currently hard at work on a new book (the follow-up to his acclaimed first memoir, 1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left), and, as The Confuser, makes perfectly plain, continues to craft an ongoing canon of utterly idiosyncratic tunes.  

“Songs appear all the time,” he says. “I realize that I’m making one up in my head and if I don’t stop and put it down, it will go in about 10 minutes. It’s almost like cloud formations. Oh look, that looks like a sheep. Well, it won’t in it won’t in five minutes, because it’ll have drifted apart. So now’s your chance. You’ve got to get it down while it’s still a sheep or a skull or an Anglepoise lamp. There’s a lot of Anglepoise lamp-shaped clouds drifting over Nashville. And you have to get them down if you want to capture that. 

“But they only appear if you’re not looking for them. Songs for me always come out of the blind spot. I realize I’m walking around and I’m going, ‘I am, I am this thing.’ Oh my God, I better write that down. I don’t sit in front of a piece of paper and go, What should I say today? I don’t have any control over the titles either. The titles just appear, and then, if you’re lucky, a song goes with it. It all just comes, it all just sneaks up on you. I don’t really have any choice about writing songs. I trained myself to do it 50 years ago and now, even if I don’t put records out, I would continue to write songs.”

Indeed, Hitchcock proudly carries the flame for a once prevalent, now somewhat niche, variety of old world singer-songcraft, a deeply personal penchant sparked by his Summer of Love adolescence and furthered throughout the myriad cultural metamorphoses that followed. 

“One of my roles has been to keep a certain kind of music alive,” says Hitchcock. “I didn’t invent this field of music, but I’ve perpetuated it. Arguably, the Soft Boys did that, amongst other things. It wasn’t peace and love or ‘oh wow, man, look at these trippy flowers,’ it was simply a certain kind of sound and a certain kind of feeling that was in those records made between 1965 and 1968 which are now seen as the Big Bang of classic rock, or whatever you want to call it. I’ve just kept that approach to music alive – verse, chorus, middle eight, harmonies, guitar solos, and free-range lyrics. I’m very lucky to be able to do this. I can’t believe I’m still allowed to do it. But nobody’s stopped me, and I’m kind of touching wood that I can carry on doing it a bit longer.”

The Confuser more than upholds the enduring value and resolute power of those halcyon influences. Though the wind may be at his back, Robyn Hitchcock has once more upped the ante for his own hallmark game, again invigorating the infinite wonder and possibilities of two-guitars-bass-and-drums with tricksy wit, keenness of vision, and indomitable gusto for onward motion.

“I think my mind has always been older than my spirit,” he says. “I’ve always had a rather sort of doomy old man view, and now I’m a doomy old man. Or a doomed old man. But my chi, my spirit, my vibe is essentially quite youthful. I’m not a mature person. I’m not a mature soul. I’ve got an awful lot of get up and go and so I just keep moving. Even if I’m just in one place.”

APRIL 2026