"Things are very still," Robyn Hitchcock reports from his home in England. "There's no wind, and we have a pale sunshine. The apples are ripening on the trees. It kind of looks, from a certain aspect, like an eighteenth-century painting. You can imagine the nymphs and men with nice calf muscles sort of striding around in the distance. From another angle you can see six-lane highway carving into the bowels of London. You can definitely see time, which is good."

Hitchcock's dual observations from home are mirrored by his music, contemplative musings on life, death, culture and also time; part wit with a dash of grit, all delivered with robust Beatle-esque melodies. On his new album Spooked, Hitchcock's style is restated on "Television," the wistful first track that opens with some tastefully frivolous "bada bing bong"s that preface a first-rate opening line: "Television, say you love me." If instantly familiar in one sense, Spooked also sounds immediately different from Hitchcock's other recordings in another. The record, due October 5th, finds the singer-songwriter backed by the sterling musical tandem that is Gillian Welch and David Rawlings.

Hitchcock met the pair after one of their concerts, and by his account, Rawlings "bounded up with a big grin and told me about a time when he'd come to a show and I'd signed his guitar." Hitchcock was mesmerized by the duo's spare yet intricate sound and numbers were exchanged, but no plans made for any recording. Earlier this year, Hitchcock happened to be in the States shooting scenes for a part he landed in The Manchurian Candidate when he found himself with some free time he utilized to visit Nashville and recorded with Welch and Rawlings. "We found that we had a lot in common," Hitchcock says, "all drinking from the well of Dylan and then spreading outwards." A six-day session found the trio playing some Hitchcock originals along with the Velvet Underground's "Candy Says," T. Rex's "Bang a Gong" and a few other Bob Dylan and John Lennon covers. A second session would ensue, but Spooked took its inspiration from the casual first collaborations.

"They really know how to underexaggerate things," Hitchcock continues. "Their approach reminds me of the third Velvet Underground record. It's low-key, but not laid back. I remember seeing them do 'Manic Depression' in London and thinking, 'Ah-hah. They're rockers in drag.' Once you put Gil behind a kit and give David an electric guitar, it wouldn't be that hard to start a power trio. Gil could probably play bass and drums at once, she's very versatile. Those first sessions were completely magical. We just sat there and floated through the instruments and the tape was always rolling."

If things were inspired and symbiotic in the recording, Hitchcock's latest batch of songs suggest something unsettled, from the album title through songs like "Creeped Out," "We're Gonna Live in the Trees" and "Demons and Fiends." It's an album with (almost) no reference to current affairs, but one colored by them nonetheless. "I've always felt anxious, actually," Hitchcock says. "The anxiety for us is always what might happen, not what's definitely happening. We've lived in the First World all our lives in relatively prosperous comfortable situations. Most of the victims of 9/11 would have gotten up in the morning with no idea of what was going to happen. They were probably just bored or irritated. 'Jesus, why do I have to go to work.' Whatever horror occurs usually occurs against a backdrop of extreme banality."

But Hitchcock isn't one to go grave or, god forbid, earnest. "The thing with paranoia is how to make it fun," he continues. "Spooked is not the same as depressed or paranoid or tortured. It's a Halloween term and Halloween is really about fear for fun. And it has a very strong visual element as well. It's all goblins and gouls and creeps and that kind of stuff. I suppose if there's any connection between that and my record, it would be that."

"Television" perfectly captures that playful anxiety capturing a co-dependent relationship between a man (or woman) and his TV. Hitchcock says the song sprung not from any television snobbery -- he cites Monty Python, Dr. Who and Top of the Pops as shows integral to his youth -- but rather a sense of Orwellian unease (with a Huxley chaser) inspired by its movement to the center of cultural universes. "As you know, the TV is an as-yet unrestricted drug," he says. "But if there's a class, it's a Class Alpha Plus, the most deadly and addictive drug known to man. It produces certain brainwaves and it pacifies people whilst at the same time fundamentally distorting and stimulating their appetite. It keeps large populations of the world permanently sexually excited in some sort of quiet way and drives everybody else out to buy things. Still, it brought me some of those beacons from my childhood, and it's brought Jennifer Aniston . . . that can't be bad. But it's become people's portal on the world. I'm not sure our species will survive long enough to wean itself off the screen or if, perhaps, this is our portal to eternity. I'm worried that it might be 'Hey, this is as far as you go, Bub.'"

In a cinematic tangent unrelated to Spooked, Hitchcock has another pair of previously unheard songs that will find their way into the world this year through film. "I Feel Beautiful" (a duet with former tour-mate Grant-Lee Phillips) and "A Man's Got to Know His Limitations, Briggs" will be included in Kris Kristensen's frightful flick Inheritance. A few fans might be familiar with the latter, a song inspired by the Dirty Harry film Magnum Force, which Hitchcock got around to recording with R.E.M.'s Peter Buck and Scott McCaughey.

More immediately, Hitchcock can been seen on the big screen, starting tonight in the remake of The Manchurian Candidate. Oscar-winning director Jonathan Demme, who filmed the 1998 concert film Storefront Hitchcock, asked Hitchcock to audition for the role of Noyle ("This sort of chief British creep"), which ultimately went to Simon McBurney ("who's a proper actor"), with Hitchcock playing a "secondary creep" who turns up on a train, in a New Jersey sandpit and a school just north of New York City where he'd "wander around corridors and scowl at people." The experience was sufficiently enjoyable to where he fesses that he'd be interested in trying it again.

"It was good fun," Hitchcock says. "But I know Jonathan is a particularly good guy; there might be an anti-Jonathan out there, a director with horns gouging through his baseball cap. I'm sure there's dystopian film worlds where they leave you in the sandpit instead of taking you to the hotel. Or when you finally get to the hotel, the door's locked and there's a succubus with bad breath waiting in your room with his scaly tail thrashing about and it's only supposed to be in a romantic comedy. And of course, there's no Jennifer Aniston. Even if there were, she wouldn't talk to you."