He's a statue with a Walkman
Knows his hemoglobin count
Statue with Walkman
Also the correct amount

Pretty boy, pretty Walkman, pretty sound
...

He's a statue with a Walkman
Actually he's lying down
Statue with a Walkman
Butterflies upon his crown

Pretty boy, pretty rooster, pretty sound
...
Basking in the dying rays
Hardly moves at all these days

We're all different versions of the same thing
...

Statue with a Walkman
Vanished like the Trilobite
Birds upon his head at night

Pretty line, pretty loser, pretty sound

Hitchcock's songs have been called "strange" and "absurd," but perhaps these lyrics are more than random ramblings. "Statue with a Walkman" repeats images of an inanimate object adorned with references to the living: hemoglobin, butterflies, boy, rooster. Along with the Walkman, these references give the statue a "pretty" pose - the semblance of being alive. Yet, because "we are all different versions of the same thing," the statue is also a representation of people - "losers," who have become fossilized - "vanished like the Trilobite."

Like the Trilobyte, the statue is separate from the living - an immoble misfit, whose most notable significance is as a resting place for birds. Hitchcock expands on this existential theme in another song called "Trilobite," from MOSSY ELIXIR, MOSSY LIQUOR (Warner 1996):

Basking on the shores of time
The little stone creature ain't dead to the world
...
Clicking away for a second of fame
A billion years later they give it a name
They call it
Trilobite, right Dwight's in the light-bite;
Trilobite, right in the light-bite, Dwight.
...
Built for a world where nothing needs shaving
Look at them stone antennae a-waving...

The Trilobyte belongs to an earlier time, with a skill ("clicking") that was common for its world, but that is lost to the modern age. Hitchcock makes a case for the unrecognized nature of everyday, ordinary talents, which clamor for "a second of fame." In his own struggle for recognition, he pleads that when he is "Too wasted these rocks to clamber, Then lean me on the cliff and encase me in amber," so that he might be found in the future when "The Trilobite wins and everybody else loses." People become statues or fossils to escape an apathetic present.

Commentary c. 1998, HeadWize
Statue With A Walkman, c. 1995, Robyn Hitchcock.
Trilobite, c. 1996, August 23rd Music, administered by Bug Music BMI.