Creativity Quote by Robyn Hitchcock

There’s a quiet insurgency in Hitchcock’s use of the word “committee,” a term that turns studio polish into bureaucracy. He’s not just talking about arrangements; he’s talking about power. In a music industry built on notes and nudges from A&R reps, producers, managers, radio consultants, and streaming-era “data,” the committee is shorthand for a process where taste gets negotiated down to the most defensible middle. Hitchcock frames the acoustic record as an escape hatch: fewer moving parts, fewer people with vetoes, fewer opportunities for the song to be sanded into something “marketable.”

The acoustic choice matters because it’s both aesthetic and tactical. Stripped-down recording limits the number of production decisions that can be second-guessed. You can’t endlessly add layers to hide uncertainty; the performance has to stand there, exposed. That exposure is the point. Hitchcock, a cult artist with a long career outside the strict mainstream, is implicitly staking out a familiar but thorny position: authenticity not as a lifestyle brand, but as a working method. It’s a claim for creative privacy in a culture that increasingly treats art as a product optimized through feedback loops.

The subtext is almost managerial: he wants fewer meetings. But the emotional register is deeper than workplace annoyance. “By committee” suggests dilution, a slow leak of personality. Hitchcock is protecting the weird angles, the idiosyncrasies that make his songs his. Acoustic becomes a declaration that the artist, not the process, gets the final say.