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Robyn Hitchcock has announced today’s long-awaited release of SHUFFLEMANIA!, available now via Tiny Ghost Records. Limited edition blue vinyl, classic black vinyl, translucent orange vinyl, CD, and cassette – as well as a range of exclusive items including limited edition screen print posters, turntable slip mat, and a special SHUFFLEMANIA! T-shirts featuring Tubby the Cat – can be found at www.robynhitchcock.com. The album will be released digitally on November 21.
The legendary British artist’s first full-length collection in over five years, SHUFFLEMANIA! has already been hailed on both sides of the Atlantic as one of the finest releases in his inimitable canon. The album includes such new Hitchcockian favorites as “The Shuffle Man” and “The Raging Muse,” both joined by official animated videos streaming now on YouTube.
PURCHASE SHUFFLEMANIA! ON CD AND VINYL
PRE-SAVE SHUFFLEMANIA! DIGITALLY
WATCH “THE SHUFFLE MAN”
WATCH “THE RAGING MUSE”
The perpetually traveling Hitchcock will herald SHUFFLEMANIA! with a wide-ranging international live schedule including shows in the United Kingdom, Norway, and the United States. Additional dates will be announced. For updates and ticket information, please visit www.robynhitchcock.com/tour.
ROBYN HITCHCOCK
ON TOUR 2022/2023
NOVEMBER
10 – Athens, GA – 40 Watt Club
11 – Decatur, GA – Eddie’s Attic
12 – Decatur, GA – Eddie’s Attic
16 – Nashville, TN – The Basement
25 – Tromsø, Norway – The North Country Fest 2022
FEBRUARY 2023
22 – Brighton, United Kingdom – Komedia
25 – London, United Kingdom – Alexandra Palace Theatre
MARCH 2023
1 – Glasgow, United Kingdom – Mono
3 – Dublin, Ireland – Whelan’s
5 – Bangor, United Kingdom – The Court House
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Recorded in locations around the world over the pandemic era, SHUFFLEMANIA! offers up ten gloriously ingenious new Robyn Hitchcock songs in just under 40 minutes - a “proper pop album” as nature intended. Songs like “Midnight Tram To Nowhere” and the optimistic, album-closing “One Day (It’s Being Scheduled)” are state-of-the-art Hitchcock, manifesting his signature wit, miraculous gift for melodic craftsmanship, and striking humanity in a world gone mad.
Having long kept up a remarkably prodigious work rate for much of his shapeshifting six-decades-and-counting career, Hitchcock found himself burned out following the completion of 2017’s acclaimed ROBYN HITCHCOCK. A 2019 Christmas visit to the ancient palace of Quetzalcoatl in Tulum, Mexico brought forth from his guitar a long overdue new song, “Feathery Serpent God,” lyrically entire and musically intact, albeit in demo form. More new songs materialized as Hitchcock flew home to his adopted Nashville. His notebook began to fill with new lyrics, some accompanied by music, others reaching completion over the coming months.
With the muse upon him, and the pandemic descending, Hitchcock bought a 5-track recording device – not dissimilar to the 4-track cassette machine on which he wrote and arranged his landmark I OFTEN DREAM OF TRAINS more than three decades earlier. He emailed his freshly recorded guitar-and-vocal songs to a star-studded selection of his (many) musician friends around the world, all of whom were also marooned at home with time to spare and much more sophisticated recording equipment than he himself was using, among them Brendan Benson, Johnny Marr, Sean Ono Lennon, Kimberley Rew, Morris Windsor, Kelley Stoltz, Anne Lise Frøkedal, Davey Lane (You Am I), Eric Slick (Dr. Dog), and Pat Sansone (Wilco, The Autumn Defense), all of whom proved more than happy to contribute.
As things opened up somewhat in the second half of 2020, Hitchcock and his partner Emma Swift returned to London, booking a final session at Abbey Road where they re-recorded most of his vocals, with Swift – a singer with an ear “far more acute than mine” – acting as producer. Stems for the whole project were then sent to longtime friend, producer/engineer Charlie Francis (R.E.M., The High Llamas, Martin Carr), who mixed the album in his Cardiff attic, where the seagulls swoop and dive.
Having been formed in constant motion, the resulting SHUFFLEMANIA! stands out among the most freewheeling works in Hitchcock’s already extensive canon, its songs and subject matter as diverse as the cast of musicians who assisted him in its creation, spanning, but not limited to, TV detectives, astrology, imaginary pubs, Greek philosophers, streetcars, sea creatures, recurring dreams, and of course, the aforementioned feathered serpent deity Quetzalcoatl.
“To me, most songs are about themselves and how they make you feel,” says Hitchcock. “What triggers them is mysterious. The songs on this record are a series of sub-personalities, fertilized by chance. You might even say they were cards, dealt to me by The Shuffle Man. Listening back now, to me SHUFFLEMANIA! is a party record, direct from my unconscious to you. Even if you’re a party of one – have fun with it!”
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PRAISE FOR SHUFFLEMANIA!
“10 short, snappy songs…its colourful patchwork exterior
clothes some of Hitchcock’s finest recent songs.”
– UNCUT (8/10)
“A reliably revelatory guide through all life’s chaos and wonder...Along with Socrates, a ‘feathery serpent god,’ and mysterious trickster ‘The Shuffle Man,’ Hitchcock’s first album since 2017 is thronged with actual humans – among them Johnny Marr, Soft Boys compadres Kimberley Rew and Morris Windsor, Sean Ono Lennon, and Brendan Benson. None of them crowd out Hitchcock’s distinctive songwriting, nor his undiminished ability to reach through the existential murk and grasp a revelation or two.”
– MOJO (****)
“To say that SHUFFLEMANIA! belongs in the man’s upper echelon becomes less hyperbolic with each spin. Concepts like ‘consistency’ and ‘quality’ are relative, but a new album from Robyn Hitchcock is always good for a grand reminder of what is truly ‘great,’
and SHUFFLEMANIA! is no exception.”
– POPMATTERS (8/10)
“SHUFFLEMANIA! blurs the boundaries between the seen and the unseen,
the known and the unknown.” – NASHVILLE SCENE
"SHUFFLEMANIA! is a kaleidoscope, throwback pop-rock record, 10 songs from various inspiration, attitude, and emotion...With his willingness to try anything, Hitchcock
proves as influential today as he was in his colorful Soft Boys and Egyptians eras."
– GLIDE
“It’s usually advisable to ride along with this great British (albeit Nashville-dwelling) eccentric’s flights of surrealism, as they often poignantly clarify more about reality than the most furrow-browed musings of others…From heavy skiffle to serpent gods to ponderings on
Pacino, noir and mortality, this charms and challenges.”
– RECORD COLLECTOR (****)
“Tuneful and catchy insanity…Excellent.”
AMERICANA UK
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ROBYN HITCHCOCK
SHUFFLEMANIA!
(Tiny Ghost Records)
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