Robyn Hitchcock & Emma Swift - Home Concert, Nashville, TN, 6-3-2020 - Element of Light Era Outtakes

A few days ago, I posted a home concert of Robyn Hitchcock with his romantic and musical partner Emma Swift. It's a rather complicated situation, but I explained in that post that although he's been doing lots of home concerts since the coronavirus pandemic lockdown began, I don't plan on posting them here for various reasons, at least not any time soon. That concert, in which they played all the songs from Hitchcock's 1986 album "Element of Light," was an exception, mainly due to the fact that the concert recording was seriously flawed with lots of gaps of silence, and I made a version that fixed the flaws.

Well, it turns out that whatever caused those flaws continued to cause more flaws in the next couple of home concerts they did, so I'm posting this here for the same reason. I got the recording from a private Facebook group of Robyn Hitchcock fans.

Anyway, as has become their habit with home concerts, Hitchcock and Swift did two shows with nearly identical set lists, one timed for an American audience on June 3,2020, and the other timed for a European audience on June 5, 2020. Both of them turned out to have the gaps of silence. But since the song list was largely the same for both, I was able to use bits of one version to patch in gaps in the other version. I decided to fix the June 3rd concert, since it had a lot fewer gaps.

I'm very happy to say that the fixing went well, overall. The gaps were uniformly bigger this time compared to the last time, usually about five seconds each, so I was easily able to find them all. I successfully fixed all the gaps in the songs without any problems. Hopefully you'll never even notice where the gaps were.

But I had a harder time with the gaps in the talking between songs, and there were a lot of those, maybe about one per talking track. Not surprisingly, the actual words spoken were very different in each concert, so I couldn't use bits from one concert to fix the gaps in the other in these cases. Instead, I edited the talking down to make the gaps less noticeable. For instance, if there was a gap in the middle of someone's comment, I probably removed the whole comment. That worked most of the time, but there are times where there was a stream of related comments, and when one part is removed, the rest might not make as much sense. As an example, after the song "Tell Me about Your Drugs," Hitchcock and Swift talked a little bit about drugs, including a reference to cat food as drugs, but there was something missing there due to one of those gaps that probably would have helped you understand their meaning better. Oh well. These are pretty minor problems, all in all.

It turns out that three songs were played in the June 3rd concert that weren't played in the June 5th concert. So I've included those songs as well. By a remarkable stroke of luck, none of those three songs had any gaps! That really is very lucky indeed, because virtually every other song from that date had multiple gaps. I also included as much banter from just before and after each of those songs as I thought was relevant. This creates a minor problem in that, between the third and forth songs, there's some talk about a pet and then there's an abrupt shift to Hitchcock announcing the start of the concert. So just try not to mind that, as it also is a very minor thing.

Also, note there are two talking tracks between the first few songs, since each one is related to the song either just before or after it. That's because, unfortunately, none of those three songs from the June 5th concert were performed back to back on that date.

The June 3rd concert is 48 minutes long. The three songs from the June 5th concert at the start are an additional 12 minutes. So the total of all the songs is exactly one hour.

Oh, one more thing. After all this writing, I forgot to discuss the music theme. The idea was to play songs from the era of the "Element of Light" album, but no songs from the album itself. One song from the album was played though, "Lady Waters and the Hooded One," because in the "Element of Light" show a few days earlier, they ran out of time before they could finish that song. The rest are generally non-album tracks, some from 1986, but a few from slightly before or after that. Many could be found on this stray tracks album I made:

https://albumsthatshouldexist.blogspot.com/2018/09/robyn-hitchcock-leopard-variouns-songs.html

But wait! Yet one more thing after that. Hitchcock revised his 1980s song "The President" to comment on current President Trump. I especially appreciate this line: "He's holding up the Bible while the rubber bullets fly. He's holding up the Bible but cannot quote one line." Talk about timely, since the event mentioned just happened a few days ago!

01 talk (Robyn Hitchcock & Emma Swift)
02 Surgery (Robyn Hitchcock & Emma Swift)
03 talk (Robyn Hitchcock & Emma Swift)
04 talk (Robyn Hitchcock & Emma Swift)
05 The President [2020 Version] (Robyn Hitchcock & Emma Swift)
06 talk (Robyn Hitchcock & Emma Swift)
07 talk (Robyn Hitchcock & Emma Swift)
08 Polly on the Shore (Robyn Hitchcock & Emma Swift)
09 talk (Robyn Hitchcock & Emma Swift)
10 talk (Robyn Hitchcock & Emma Swift)
11 The Leopard (Robyn Hitchcock & Emma Swift)
12 talk (Robyn Hitchcock & Emma Swift)
13 The Black Crow Knows (Robyn Hitchcock & Emma Swift)
14 talk (Robyn Hitchcock & Emma Swift)
15 Birdshead (Robyn Hitchcock & Emma Swift)
16 talk (Robyn Hitchcock & Emma Swift)
17 The Crawling (Robyn Hitchcock & Emma Swift)
18 talk (Robyn Hitchcock & Emma Swift)
19 Tell Me about Your Drugs (Robyn Hitchcock & Emma Swift)
20 talk (Robyn Hitchcock & Emma Swift)
21 I Used to Say I Love You (Robyn Hitchcock & Emma Swift)
22 talk (Robyn Hitchcock & Emma Swift)
23 Vibrating (Robyn Hitchcock & Emma Swift)
24 talk (Robyn Hitchcock & Emma Swift)
25 You’ve Got (Robyn Hitchcock & Emma Swift)
26 talk (Robyn Hitchcock & Emma Swift)
27 Lady Waters and the Hooded One (Robyn Hitchcock & Emma Swift)
28 talk (Robyn Hitchcock & Emma Swift)
29 Victorian Squid (Robyn Hitchcock & Emma Swift)
30 talk (Robyn Hitchcock & Emma Swift)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15292568/RobynH_2020_HomeConcrtNshvilleTN__6-3-2020_atse.zip.html

For the cover art, Emma Swift posted a photo at her Instagram account that shows the "Element of Light" album, presumably in Robyn Hitchcock's album collection, or maybe their shared collection. I could have gone with a screenshot of them at the concert instead, but it was low resolution and didn't look good.

Robyn Hitchcock & Emma Swift - Home Concert, Nashville, TN, 5-29-2020 - The Element of Light Album

This album needs a fair amount of explanation. First off, Robyn Hitchcock has been extremely busy when it comes to home concerts during the coronavirus pandemic lockdown. Together with his romantic and musical partner Emma Swift, he's recorded a whole series of concerts of nearly an hour each. In fact, by my count, this is the twentieth such concert he's done since the middle of March 2020! That overstates things a bit because he's tended to do concerts in pairs with nearly identical set lists for both, one for the European audience and the other for the American audience, but still, he (and Emma) have been very busy indeed.

If you've been paying any attention to this blog, you know I'm a very big Hitchcock fan. I may well have posted more albums by him than anyone else. I would love to post many of these recent home concerts, but I haven't. The reason is that he's required people to pay to view the videos of these home concerts. Here's the link, to StageIt, if you want to join up, because they definitely are still happening on a frequent basis:

https://www.stageit.com/site/landing

Anyway, Hitchcock has stated that he doesn't care if people share the music after the initial airing of each concert. That said, I don't want to rush into posting them because if they got around widely on YouTube and such, it probably would lower his revenue, and it's not easy for musicians to make a living during the pandemic. I do want to post more of them, but I think it's prudent to wait a white first.

However, although I'm not posting those home concerts in general, this one concert is an exception. The reason is that when it aired, there was some kind of technical glitch that resulted in many small gaps of silence in the songs. I took up the task of fixing them. As a result, the folks at Fegmaniax agreed I could share this one at my blog as well, so here we are.

Now, as for those gaps, I believe I've gotten rid of all of them. Luckily, most of them resulted in no loss of music, so if I just cut out the gap of silence in a sound editing program, the problem was solved. But occasionally, the gaps represented an actual loss of music. In those cases, I would have been screwed. However, I was extremely fortunate in that Hitchcock played the exact same songs in the same way two days earlier. (Remember I mentioned above that he's essentially been doing each of his home concerts twice, one for Europe and one for America.) That earlier show was even more messed up with the gap problem. But it never happened that the gaps occurred in the exact same spots. So I was able to copy and paste in the missing music from those versions of songs. I might have missed a gap here or there, so if you notice any, please let me know and I'll fix it.

Phew! That was complicated to explain. But now let me get to the actual music. Many of Hitchcock's 2020 home concerts have had themes. For instance, he's done entire concerts of songs by the Beatles, Bob Dylan, David Bowie, and Syd Barrett, respectively. This particular concert is a performance of his entire 1986 album "Element of Light." But while that album was done with a band, this just features Hitchcock on vocals and acoustic guitar, and Emma Swift on harmony vocals. Furthermore, there's the usual entertaining banter between songs, made even more entertaining by Swift frequently chiming in as well. (For some reason, the gap problem almost never happened during the between song banter, except for the 23rd track, where I had to edit out a few comments because of it. I couldn't use the other concert as back-up, since the banter was always different.)

I'm puzzled as to why, but these home concerts through StageIt have a fixed length, which I think is 50 minutes. As soon as that time limit is reached, the recording ends, even if Hitchcock is in mid-song or mid-sentence. Due to this, he didn't play any extra songs, except for "The Ghost Ship," which was an "Element of Light" outtake. The other songs are all the exact songs from the album, played in the original order. There also isn't that much banter, relatively speaking, so all of the album could be played. They managed to squeeze it all in, although it was a close call.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy. And if you want more of this sort of thing right away, please sign up at the StageIt link. Otherwise, I plan on posting more of his home concerts here eventually, but who knows how long it'll be before I feel it's okay to do that.

01 talk (Robyn Hitchcock & Emma Swift)
02 The Ghost Ship (Robyn Hitchcock & Emma Swift)
03 talk (Robyn Hitchcock & Emma Swift)
04 If You Were a Priest (Robyn Hitchcock & Emma Swift)
05 talk (Robyn Hitchcock & Emma Swift)
06 Winchester (Robyn Hitchcock & Emma Swift)
07 talk (Robyn Hitchcock & Emma Swift)
08 Somewhere Apart (Robyn Hitchcock & Emma Swift)
09 talk (Robyn Hitchcock & Emma Swift)
10 Ted, Woody and Junior (Robyn Hitchcock & Emma Swift)
11 talk (Robyn Hitchcock & Emma Swift)
12 The President (Robyn Hitchcock & Emma Swift)
13 talk (Robyn Hitchcock & Emma Swift)
14 Raymond Chandler Evening (Robyn Hitchcock & Emma Swift)
15 talk (Robyn Hitchcock & Emma Swift)
16 Bass (Robyn Hitchcock & Emma Swift)
17 talk (Robyn Hitchcock & Emma Swift)
18 Airscape (Robyn Hitchcock & Emma Swift)
19 talk (Robyn Hitchcock & Emma Swift)
20 Never Stop Bleeding (Robyn Hitchcock & Emma Swift)
21 talk (Robyn Hitchcock & Emma Swift)
22 Lady Waters and the Hooded One (Robyn Hitchcock & Emma Swift)
23 talk (Robyn Hitchcock & Emma Swift)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15292563/RobynH_2020_HomeConcrtNshvilleTN__5-29-2020_atse.zip.html

Hitchcock has generally been posting photos for each of his home concerts a few days in advance, in order to help promote them. This is the promo photo for this particular concert. Note the "Element of Light" album on the sofa behind him.

Robyn Hitchcock & Emma Swift - Love Is a Drag - Non-Album Tracks (2016)

Starting around 2014, and continuing until now, Robyn Hitchcock began collaborating with Emma Swift, an up-and-coming singer-songwriter who has only released an EP of her own so far. Their collaboration is curiously limited, though. Typically, she'll show up at his concert and sing in harmony for two or three songs. But that's it. I haven't seen any instances of her singing all the way through a concert (like Sean Nelson did in the Hitchcock concert I just posted yesterday).

When it comes to studio recordings, their collaboration has also been curiously limited. They jointly released a single in 2015, and then another one in 2016... and that's it. I'm hopeful they'll put out a full album together eventually, because I always like the sound of male and female voices in harmony. But in the meantime, I've created an album of what they might have released in 2016, if they'd done a whole album instead of just two singles.

Naturally, I started with both sides of their two singles. But how would I fill out the rest to make it a full album? I had lots of options, because they probably have done 20 or more songs together in concert so far. However, I wanted to stick with very high sound quality recordings, so it would all sound like a studio album. Luckily, they've done a few TV and radio appearances where they've played songs not on their singles.

I relied on those for all the rest, except for the very last track, which is from a concert, but I considered the sound quality good enough to match the rest. I also removed the audience noise from it. I actually had to fade it out before the end due to some talking over the music.

Three of the four songs on their two singles are Hitchcock compositions that appear nowhere else, plus there's a cover of a Neil Young song ("Motion Pictures.") The rest is a mix of Hitchcock originals from his earlier albums and more cover songs (of David Bowie, Bob Dylan, and Roxy Music).

I think it makes for a very nice album. It reminds me a lot of Richard and Linda Thompson. I hope this duo will do more recording together soon.

01 Follow Your Money (Robyn Hitchcock & Emma Swift)
02 Motion Pictures (Robyn Hitchcock & Emma Swift)
03 Love Is a Drag (Robyn Hitchcock & Emma Swift)
04 Life Is Change (Robyn Hitchcock & Emma Swift)
05 Cheese Alarm (Robyn Hitchcock & Emma Swift)
06 Nietzche’s Way (Robyn Hitchcock & Emma Swift)
07 The Prettiest Star (Robyn Hitchcock & Emma Swift)
08 Glass Hotel (Robyn Hitchcock & Emma Swift)
09 Just like a Woman (Robyn Hitchcock & Emma Swift)
10 Ole Tarantula (Robyn Hitchcock & Emma Swift)
11 In Every Dream Home a Heartache (Robyn Hitchcock & Emma Swift)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16697082/ROBYNHTCHCK2015-2016_LovIsaDrg_atse.zip.html

The cover is simply the cover of their "Love Is a Drag" single.