Episode Details

Few songwriters have constructed imaginative worlds as distinctive, or as enduring, as Robyn Hitchcock. Across more than five decades, his songs have blurred the boundaries between memory and myth, humor and melancholy, everyday observation and surreal revelation. With the publication of his remarkable new memoir Stranded in the Future and the release of his new album The Confuser, it seemed the perfect moment to explore not simply Hitchcock's work, but the imaginative life from which it springs.

Across more than fifty years—from The Soft Boys through his remarkable solo career—Hitchcock has cultivated a body of work where surreal imagery, humor, memory, obsession, and startling emotional honesty coexist in songs that continue to reward close listening.

In this conversation, Scott Catey and guest co-host Andrew Hunt sit down with Hitchcock to discuss his acclaimed new memoir Stranded in the Future, his first memoir 1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left, both published by Akashic Books, and his forthcoming album The Confuser, on the Tony Ghost label. The conversation ranges from songwriting, memory, and technology, to creativity and the peculiar relationship between memoir and imagination.

Rather than treating songs as coded autobiography, Hitchcock describes how music grows from memory, mythmaking, and what he calls “hybrids”—real people transformed into constituents of his imaginative landscapes, from which his songs emerge. Along the way, the conversation explores boarding school, Bob Dylan, Syd Barrett, The Beatles, Nashville, mortality, artistic obsession, and the strange ways each of us becomes a custodian of disappearing worlds.

Whether you’re a longtime Hitchcock devotee or discovering his work for the first time, this episode offers a rare look inside one of popular music’s most singular creative minds.

In this episode

• Why Hitchcock says he “never left” 1967 
• Winchester College and discovering Dylan, The Beatles, Pink Floyd, and more 
• The difference between factual truth and emotional truth 
• Why “a song is about itself” 
• Mr. A, Mr. B., and Ms. C.: obsession, mythology, and creative life 
• Memoir as reconstruction rather than chronology 
• Writing books on an iPhone in the middle of the night 
• Why creativity is essential to mental health 
• Building The Confuser with Nashville musicians 
• The enduring influence of The Beatles 
• The relationship between songs, memory, and identity 
• Why Hitchcock keeps writing 

Books discussed

1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left

Published in 2024 by Akashic Books.

An evocative memoir of Hitchcock’s fourteenth year, when boarding school, Bob Dylan, The Beatles, and the cultural upheavals of the late 1960s permanently shaped his imagination. More than an autobiography, it is an exploration of the year that became Hitchcock’s enduring creative homeland.

Stranded in the Future

Published July 2026 by Akashic Books.

Picking up where 1967 leaves off, Stranded in the Future follows Hitchcock from 1968-1978, the years leading to The Soft Boys while exploring memory, artistic obsession, and the self-mythology that Hitchcock created around the figures who shaped his life. Rather than a conventional memoir, it reads as an imaginative reconstruction of consciousness itself.

Forthcoming Album

The Confuser

Hitchcock’s newest studio album finds him embracing one of the strongest ensemble recordings of his career. Recorded in Nashville with Eric Slick, Todd Bolden, Jeremy Fetzer, Pat Berkery, and a remarkable circle of collaborators, The Confuser combines the melodic adven