From Robyn on social media in 2025
Driving Aloud (Radio Storm)…was originally entitled “Driving To Portland.” I wrote the words on a tour bus driving through Washington State in early 1992 while my father was living out his last few hours back home in England. He was surrounded by the women who loved him and I didn’t think he’d need me there to see him off. When I spoke to him on the phone he was already unconscious; just a death-rattle came over the Atlantic to my ear in a Portland hotel room. It was the first and only time I managed to tell my father that I loved him. This song was a collage of thoughts from a delirious mind - his or mine, maybe.
Robyn talked about this song on the promo record SPECTRE, on which he explains each of the songs on RESPECT:
"'Driving Aloud' is a very ... impacted song. It's the most like the
songs I used to write, on the record, in terms of being impenetrable,
or obstruse or something. Not many songs by anyone refer to Harrison
Ford, I mean, Harrison is not generally a much sung-about person. It was
originally called 'Driving to Portland.' I wrote it in the back of
the bus, as I was sitting with a cup of tea and a guitar, trying to
sing in a key that was high enough for me to hear myself over the engine
of the bus, and I was playing this riff that I had made up in the shed
at the same time I'd made up 'Railway Shoes.' And I wrote the words,
I mean I wrote six or seven verses and I kept verses one, two, and five,
or something. And then, later, after we'd recorded it, I rushed back
and wrote a whole lot of extra verses which we had pressed up and then
demolished again, so there's a completely different version of the
song lying around somewhere, with a load of yet more verses, on a
completely unrelated topic. But ... the idea was basically momentum.
If you were talking out the window of a bus, of a slow-moving vehicle
to somebody, and somebody asked you a question, and you reply. But
you're replying not to the person who asked you that question but to
another person, who then asks you another question, to which you reply,
but that doesn't reach the questioner. It's a series of completely
dislocated conversations held together by extreme anxiety, indecision,
and a feeling of something ominous about to happen up the road."