Time & Perspective Quote by Robyn Hitchcock

There is a sneaky candor in Hitchcock's phrasing: not a grand reinvention speech, just a shrug that lands like a statement of values. "A good living" is deliberately modest, almost anti-mythic. He punctures the romantic story of the starving artist and replaces it with something more practical: the gig worked. The subtext is gratitude without genuflection, a career summed up in the unflashy language of rent and groceries rather than legacy and "greatness."

Then comes the pivot: "but now it's time". That small conjunction carries the weight of decades. It suggests a clock you don't control - aging, attention shifting, the body changing, the industry mutating - and it frames the next phase as necessity, not whim. Hitchcock doesn't call it retirement or even a "new chapter". He calls it "all the other stuff", a phrase so casual it becomes poignant. It implies that music, for all its meaning, has been the organizing principle that crowded out everything else: family, health, ordinary pleasures, maybe the kind of stillness touring and chasing records doesn't allow.

Context matters: Hitchcock is a cult figure from a generation where making a living in music meant constant hustling, not algorithmic windfalls. Saying this now reads like a soft critique of the careerist trap, even when you "win" it. The line works because it refuses spectacle. It treats a musician's life less like a brand and more like a person finally claiming bandwidth.