Robyn Hitchcock has a rule. "If I'm in the same town for [two shows in] an evening or two nights, I don't play the same show," he says. "None of the songs overlap, so if you're a completist, you'll get two utterly different shows."

The singer-songwriter is in town to play back-to-back shows tonight at the Dakota in Minneapolis, but not before he dropped in to The Current studio to chat with Jim McGuinn.

Hitchcock marvels at the way time is altered during a live show. "Part of my show is you do fracture the space-time continuum, but in a benign way, not the same way that time travel does, where you interfere with history, he says. "Time is very elastic onstage. It suddenly moves at a different speed from how it does in real life."

Listen to the full interview to hear more about Hitchcock's career and his more recent projects, including the backstory behind his new song, "San Francisco Patrol," as well as how he chose the cover tunes to put on his new record, The Man Upstairs. "When you first start, you start by trying to sing other people's songs, trying to mimic them," he says. "In the last 15 years, I've done a lot of it. I got used to doing other people's songs a lot and getting back into being an interpreter."

Robyn Hitchcock plays tonight at the Dakota Jazz Club & Restaurant in Minneapolis. His new album, The Man Upstairs, is available on Yep Roc Records.