Robyn played a proto version of this song in an
interview with Diedre O'Donoghue in 1989, stating that he was making it up as he played it. In his 2020 interview with Jim Derogatis, Robyn talked about the origins of "Cynthia Mask". Although Cynthia (the woman he was about to start a relationship with at the time) is in the song, it's not really (or perhaps, not only) about her. The idea of a Cynthia mask has to do with names and identity, the actual you vs. the idea of you. The last verse is inspired by a place on the Isle of Wight. Robyn wrote more about the song on his
Substack in August 2025:
This song came to me after my band had been opening for R.E.M. for three weeks in March 1989. In my head, I was trying to sing like a slowed-down Michael Stipe, whom I had witnessed in peak form every night mesmerising hordes of young Americans, while Peter, Mike, Bill and guest musician Peter Holsapple were firing on all cylinders too. Michael and the boys were living quite accelerated lives at that time, and it was fascinating to watch them being subjected to the G-force that comes with intense career momentum.
My own life was a jumble in a jungle back then. Looking in the mirror at the Hollywood Roosevelt one lunchtime, I noticed for the first time lines around my eyes, and the first grey hairs spreading out from my forehead. This was a novelty at that stage; I hadn't taken in that aging is irreversible, and I would have been well advised to put a down payment on some cosmetic surgery.
To some extent, "Cynthia Mask" is about using your own schtick as a disguise, cloaking yourself in attitudes and mannerisms to protect the inner you from the outside world. But it's also a love song to my girlfriend of the time. Songs can multitask: seldom are they about only one person or thing, in my experience. Perhaps I was the one wearing the Cynthia mask? After all, my previous girlfriend had also been called Cynthia. Was I hiding behind my relationships? [Robyn talks a bit about the two Cynthias in his prototype version of Cynthia Mask played on the Deirdre O'Donoghue show - ed]
In the last verse, there's a line about the yawning cross and the hill full of pebbles. I was thinking of the Tennyson Monument on the High Down above Freshwater on the Isle of Wight, where I was living part-time. That steep hill is also known as Tennyson Down, as the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, lived in the lee of it back in Victorian times. Nearing the summit, small rocks and stones seem to rise out of the ground, as the great cross looms overhead. You feel as though you're getting to the centre of something dark and profound, and not always easy to face - yourself, perhaps?
For me, a song is there to be sung first, and maybe analysed afterwards. One of the joys of songwriting is not to know exactly what you're writing about: your unconscious mind - if you let it - will throw various shapes onto the paper or into the air. Rather like a hand of cards or any other form of divination, what your mind sends your way is there to be interpreted later. To me, the strands in any one song are complex and often too opaque to fathom, and if they are that way, they're all the more likely to contain truths that cannot be precisely dissected and explained.
So, in the end, your interpretation of Cynthia Mask is liable to be just as accurate as mine, if not more so. Enjoy, and please take care that nothing is damaged in the process…
Cynthia Mask came out on the EYE album in 1990. This live video was recorded at home yesterday.