From Robyn on Patreon in 2022
This song was written in London in autumn 1982. I had just returned from my first trip to Norway, a place of endless twilights. It was the early days of my touring life, and I had played very few shows overseas. After a week in a yellow splitter van with seven other seedy Brit musicians, careening around blind corners 1000 metres above a winding fjord, I felt further away from home than I’d ever felt before. When we reached a plateau half way up the country that looked like the surface of Mars, it began to seem like an adventure.

Soon I was thinking quite loudly, and with the gain turned up, a Norwegian psychic landscape grew in my brain. Embryonic songs formed in it. One of them was set in a warm, wet night with dead leaves falling round a candle guttering on a small circular table. A wine bottle reflects the candlelight, opaque and menacing. Somebody appears from the shadows - their name begins with an E - and what follows may not be healthy but it will feel amazing. Next day, as so often happens, there will be no trace of the night before.