British rocker Robyn Hitchcock had been in a bit of a songwriting slump when he made a trip to the Mayan ruins at Tulum, Mexico, around the time of the 2019 winter solstice. But shortly after that visit, he heard the call of his muse.
Located on the eastern coast of Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, Tulum was a thriving Mayan city between the 13th and 15th centuries. A major port, its centerpiece was a magnificent pyramid honoring the god of fertility, a temple dubbed El Castillo by Spanish conquistadors that still stands high on a cliff overlooking the Caribbean Sea. A couple of weeks after Hitchcock visited El Castillo, he had a burst of creativity that led to his exceptional new album Shufflemania!, which will be released via Tiny Ghost Records on Oct. 21.
“I didn’t write very many songs between 2016 and 2019,” part-time Nashvillian Hitchcock says by phone from his house in England. “When I wasn’t on tour, I was working on a collection of piano instrumentals at home in Nashville.
“Just before the pandemic hit, I went down to [Tulum],” he continues. “I went to the palace of Kukulkan, aka Quetzalcoatl, the feathery serpent god. Kukulkan was a powerful symbol of fertility, but you know, these gods seem to wear so many hats.”
One of the hats worn by Kukulkan is patron of the arts. While he made no formal offerings to the god while in Tulum, a few weeks after his visit there, Hitchcock wrote “The Feathery Serpent God” in a moment of sudden inspiration.
“The sort of kinetic flow of songwriting, of guitar songwriting, suddenly started up again after about four years,” he recalls. “I was in a hotel in Florida, thinking not much about anything, and out it came. It was just there in my notebook and on my phone within about half an hour.”
Hitchcock acknowledges the spirit of Kukulkan may still be active at El Castillo.
“Well, it probably is,” he says. “I hope I’m not in the grip of any forces I don’t understand. [Laughs] But it certainly seems to have, as we say in Britain, kicked me up the ass.”
Over the next 12 months, Hitchcock penned and recorded the 10 songs that make up Shufflemania! The material blurs the boundaries between the seen and the unseen, the known and the unknown. And the feathery serpent god is not the only supernatural entity to make an appearance. There’s the inspiration for the album’s title and opening song “The Shuffle Man.” You could say Hitchcock created the Shuffle Man, but it might be even more accurate to say he simply gave the entity a name.
“The Shuffle Man, well, you know, he came into my head,” he says. “All these things arrive very fast. I don’t really think about them. The Shuffle Man, I think he’s just really chance, you know — what I call the imp of chance or the imp of change. It’s really kind of embracing the random. The Shuffle Man just deals you whatever he deals you, and then you just have to make the best of it.”
Three of the songs are inspired by Hitchcock’s love of noir fiction and films, including the beautiful “The Man Who Loves the Rain,” which features harmony vocals by his partner, singer-songwriter Emma Swift.
“Gina Arnold, a writer in San Francisco, put up a bunch of titles by the author Raymond Chandler, titles for unwritten stories or unfinished stories,” Hitchcock explains. “One of them was ‘The Man Who Loved the Rain.’ And I just moved it into ‘The Man Who Loves the Rain.’ So the song references Raymond Chandler, who has two graves in La Jolla where he’s buried.”
The album also touches on a recurring dream Hitchcock has of fish squirming in the grass. The scene makes an appearance in “The Raging Muse.”
“It’s usually set in the quite fertile part of Britain, down in Hampshire where my parents used to live,” Hitchcock says of the dream. “It’s down the road from the place my parents lived in, an old mill that was on a river. The fish are not confined to the river. I’m walking around, and they’re just kind of squirming through the grass. I don’t know if that means that they’re fish out of water and it’s a sign of being in the wrong place or what. But as I look, I just see more and more of them really just kind of writhing around. Maybe they’re like the serpent god — they’re just some kind of force.”
The fish in the grass, the feathered serpent deity and the imp of chance are just three of the cast of characters that inhabit Shufflemania! They are joined by a murdered Greek philosopher, an English lord, a TV private eye who’s a Scorpio and the aforementioned noir novelist.
“I think this album sums up so many of Robyn’s loves,” says Swift, who co-produced the album with Hitchcock. “It really encapsulates a lot of the art that inspires him.”
Because Shufflemania! was made during the COVID lockdown, most of the recording was done remotely and includes performances by a large number of musicians from across the globe. With technical assistance from Swift and their two sibling cats Tubby and Ringo (who appear on the album’s cover), Hitchcock recorded rhythm guitar parts and scratch vocals on his Zoom recorder and then sent them to musician friends he thought would be a good fit for the songs. One of the first people to receive a song was former Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr.
“ ‘The Inner Life of Scorpio’ went to Johnny Marr because Johnny’s a Scorpio, so I thought he might like that one,” Hitchcock says. “He’s playing almost everything on it. He’s playing the drums and the piano and the acoustic guitar and, I think, bass. I played a bit of acoustic lead, and then it went to my friend Anne Lise Frøkedal in Oslo, who did the harmonies.”
Wilco’s Pat Sansone also appears on that song, as well as four other tracks, playing a variety of guitars, keyboards and percussion. Brendan Benson, who produced Hitchcock’s 2017 self-titled album, plays most of the instruments on two of the album’s hardest rocking tracks, “The Shuffle Man” and “The Sir Tommy Shovell,” the latter about an imaginary English pub.
“I made up Tommy Shovell,” Hitchcock says. “I think that was a point when I thought, ‘Oh God, I’d love to go to a pub in England, and I don’t see that happening anytime soon.’ Brendan said he wanted to try to make it sound like [Hitchcock’s former band] 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.”
Dr. Dog drummer Eric Slick, You Am I lead guitarist Davey Lane and multi-instrumentalist Sean Ono Lennon also made remote appearances on the album. So did mix engineer Charlie Francis, who overdubbed a variety of instruments on multiple songs.
Once the tracking was mostly done, Hitchcock and Swift traveled to London and recorded all the final vocals for the album over two days at Abbey Road studios. The first of the sessions was on Oct. 9, the anniversary of John Lennon’s birth.
“I just had this idea one night, it must have been in late August or early September [2020],” Swift recalls. “I saw that Abbey Road was open again, having been closed for lockdown. And I just thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful to go and record some vocals on John Lennon’s birthday?’ I think there are certain things that you have on your bucket list as an artist, and I knew that for Robyn, recording at Abbey Road was definitely one of those things.”
Hitchcock closes the album with the hopeful “One Day,” the song that features Sean Lennon.
“I had a jam with [Sean] in New York a few years ago, and he was playing some fantastic drums,” Hitchcock says. “So I just contacted him and asked if he’d play some drums. And he added all sorts of effects — vocoder and marimba and kind of tropical sounds and a bit of bass.”
Some might hear “One Day” as an echo of the utopian dream offered by Lennon’s father in his masterpiece “Imagine.” Near the end of the song, Hitchcock sings, “One day / The color of your skin won’t be the great divide / And one day you’ll care how other people feel inside.”
“It’s a beautifully romantic and philosophical song for Robyn,” Swift says. “Sometimes he can be quite barbed, but this one is very tender. And it makes a lovely ending to the album.”
