Ghost in Sunlight Releases Gigs Lyrics Comments

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Author
Robyn Hitchcock
According to our records, Robyn has played this song 21 times, most recently at Old Town School of Folk Music on June 07, 2025. He first performed it at StageOne on November 22, 2019, 5 years and 6 months earlier.

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Comments

From Robyn on Patreon in 2024
I’ve been working on this song for years, and now it’s almost finished, I think. Every time I play through it the ending changes slightly, but this take, recorded with Kelley Stoltz at his legendary Electric Duck studios in San Francisco gets pretty close. With this demo, I’ll have a complete pack of compositions lined up for my next self-penned album: the working title of which is "Overhead Wiring I Have Loved, Volumes 7 to 13".

Like many of my piano songs, I can imagine this being sung by John Lennon. Or possibly John Cale. It’s at the emotional end of my spectrum, triggered in part by the demolition of the old streetcar tracks that lay just beneath the surface of the road outside my house in Nashville. There were old tracks outside the apartment when I briefly lived in Washington DC, too. They’re harder to find in Britain now, though I’ll still walk an extra mile to see a rusting pole that once would have supported trolleybus overhead wiring. There - I’ve lost you :)

Yet such apparently random things can be a prism through which our feelings are filtered, and you mess with feelings at your peril. God may be the universe, and the universe is love: but it takes a special kind of transport to realise that. And we cling to what we know…

Lyrics

One, two, three, four

In the middle of a sentence
On a Friday afternoon
You disappear
Like a ghost in sunlight
Your outline starts to fade

In the middle of the desert
I saw the Queen Marie
Her chandeliers
Ablaze
Blazing as she sank into the sand
Blazing as she went down with her hands
You cling to what you know
Like a ghost in sunlight

It's fixin' to rain
A tornado's on the line
They tore up the tracks
This morning
The tracks they laid, the day that you were born
Look at them, they're gone

Yeahhhhhhhh
I love it
Yeahhhhhhhh
That's how I feel tonight

Yeahhhhhhhh
I'm saying, yeahhhhhhhh
I'm saying, yeahhhhhhhh

Like a ghost in sunlight