Time & Perspective Quote by Robyn Hitchcock

“If you do things out of time you’re weird” lands like a throwaway line until you hear the musician’s ear behind it: time isn’t just a clock, it’s the social grid. Hitchcock is talking about rhythm, sure, but also about the quiet authoritarianism of tempo in everyday life. Stay on the beat and you’re “normal.” Drag, rush, pause too long, arrive too early, laugh a second late, make an album that doesn’t match the current mood cycle and suddenly you’ve crossed the thin line from eccentric to suspect.

The intent feels half-jokey, half-diagnostic: a sly field note from someone who’s spent a career being the guy slightly to the left of the mainstream. Hitchcock’s catalog has always prized the skewed angle - psychedelic folk, surreal imagery, melodies that sound familiar until they don’t. In that light, “weird” isn’t an insult; it’s the price tag on originality. The subtext is that culture polices timing as much as content. You can be radical, but do it on schedule. You can grieve, but wrap it up before it makes other people uncomfortable. You can change, but not faster than your friends can metabolize.

Context matters because “out of time” is also a musician’s most basic failure mode. Hitchcock folds that technical anxiety into a social observation: the same way a drummer can derail a band, a person can derail a room by refusing its tempo. It’s a compact defense of misfit pacing, and a wink at how often “weird” is just what we call someone who won’t hurry along with the rest of us.