Notes from Robyn on Patreon in 2020.

Los Angeles has always been a mythical place. It was the crucible for the movie business, and it is purpose-built for its inhabitants to furnish their isolated cellular nests with their individual dreams. Your car and your house - no need to spend too much time out of those two modules. I have been saying this for years and it's still true: LA’s superpower is to make even sunlight look artificial.

LA was mythical to me before I ever went there, and 35 years later remains so. Unlike some other great American cities, I’ve never woven my own story into it, really. I still see it through the twin lenses of Raymond Chandler and Jim Morrison, and both my nods to them (Morrison being The Lizard in my song of that name) were written before I ever visited. Cruising through the twilight vegetation in car I feel their spectral presences almost unbearably: the numb pleasures and the voyeuristic limbo of the detective/stalker. Beauty becomes a creepshow.

That said, I feel increasingly at home there - tho’ as a non-driver my Hollywood Englishman role would be a tough one. In my head there exists a phantom houseparty in Laurel Canyon Boulevard, set in the pre-Manson-era Hollywood Hills, where I would lock into the eternal groove - the groove of no return - and the Mystery One would read my cards in her purple robes...

...and perhaps that’s at the root of this song, recorded in 2017 - my latest offering to the Mythical City that has no core and no limits.