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.