From Robyn on Patreon in 2023
When this song started to come through to me I was in Norway playing a piano. The melody reminded me of The Doors, at the cabaret end of their spectrum. I was in a hotel in Sandane, somewhere north of Bergen, embedded deep in a labyrinth of fjords. It was a rainy Saturday afternoon in early autumn, and I had just played a lunchtime outdoor gig to a few bewildered Norwegians. A seasick-sounding piano stood against one wall of the hotel dining room which was technically closed but nobody seemed to care: at 3pm the kitchen area was deserted. There was a chestnut tree outside, with a desolate white table and chair beneath its dripping branches. I sat in the empty dining room for an hour, staring out the window at that tree, with my fingertips clacking up and down the keys of that old Norwegian piano. It had probably been there during the German occupation, 40 years previously. I wondered how many boiled eggs and herrings had been eaten in that echoing room since the invaders had fled Norway, leaving a trail of burnt houses behind them…

Next thing I remember, I was back in Southern England, where it was also raining. I transferred the piano melody to the guitar and transcribed the words running thru my mind to this, and quite a few other songs. I had a barn all to myself; it was further into autumn now and the rain was pulling leaves off the trees as the twilight crept in earlier each night. In a few weeks time the clocks would be set back an hour, and wintertime would engulf us altogether. The melancholy was exquisite; I was sinking into my own reverie even deeper than usual - approximating my psychic zero, as JG Ballard put it. I imagined myself in love with several people, and wrote odes to each of them.

In this particular song, my recurring dream of a summer’s afternoon accelerating into wintertime all in a couple of hours meshed with another frequent dream, one of a mysterious railway line open only on Sunday. On the train there is a buffet car selling pre-war pints of beer, staffed by a handsome woman in an RAF uniform. This fantasmagorical bar also stocks sandwiches:

“What’ll it be, luv? We’ve got cheese, cheese and ham, or ham…”

There’s no narrative in either of these dreams: they’re just scenarios that screen in my head from time to time like advertisements at the movies. They’re vivid and slightly creepy, and obviously underpin my psyche in some way that means I need to dream them. The idea that everything happens for a reason is as mind-blowing as the fact that this phone I’m now writing on knows pretty much what my next word will be.

Oh boy, as Buddy Holly once exclaimed. I wonder what he dreamed of? And what do you dream of, gentle reader?

Tonight the moon shines on my legs, as smooth as eggs. Anything can become a song if you let it. I’ve been singing “I Often Dream of Trains” for more than half my life now, to the point where it feels like I’m covering someone else’s composition when I sing it. I can’t really recall how it felt *not* to have written it, any more than I can remember how life felt before The Beatles released “A Hard Day’s Night”.