I Often Dream of Trains

Infobox Album |
Name = I Often Dream of Trains
Type = Album
Artist = Robyn Hitchcock


Released = 1984
Recorded = 1981-1984
Genre = Folk pop
Length = 54:33
Label = Midnight Music
Producer = Robyn Hitchcock
Reviews =
* Allmusic Rating|4.5|5 [http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=10:08qog4ettv1z link]
Last album = "Groovy Decay"
(1982)
This album = "I Often Dream of Trains"
(1984)
Next album = "Fegmania!"
(1985)

I Often Dream of Trains is the third album by Robyn Hitchcock, released in 1984.

After the break-up of The Soft Boys, Hitchcock recorded two solo albums — "Black Snake Diamond Role" and the experimental "Groovy Decay" — before hitting an artistic slump mitigated only by some collaborations with Captain Sensible. He re-emerged in 1984 with this all-acoustic album, the cathartic process of which he later likened to John Lennon's first solo work "Plastic Ono Band", as he shook off the depressing effects of the unsatisfying "Groovy Decay" sessions.

The album was recorded in the space of a few days under the working title "Crystal Branches" (taken from a line in the song "Winter Love", not originally included in the track listing). Hitchcock plays acoustic and electric guitar and piano and delivers direct with occasional multi-tracked vocals.

The vinyl album ran to fourteen tracks, bookended by the 'classical' "Nocturne". In between, Hitchcock's lyrics reference gravestones, the ghosts of derelict trams and falling leaves, the subtext of beautiful death surfacing in almost every song including the surreal-absurdist "Furry Green Atom Bowl", in which he depicts "roots in the earth and kidneys in the body", wryly commenting that "That's the way to stay".

Characteristically, Hitchcock punctuates his imagery with plenty of humour and stark, wintry arrangements which resist any descent into gloom. The album's title track accounts a train journey through Basingstoke in which he dreams of love between the buffet car and the corridor, as the winter sun falls outside the train windows. (More than 20 years later, Hitchcock would expand on this semi-hallucinatory situation in an evocative novelette accompanying the box set "I Wanna Go Backwards", which details the presumably invented dream-experience which underpins the lyric, and was almost certainly conceived subsequently.)

Re-issued on CD, tracks listed below as 8 to 12 were added, taken from Hitchcock's recent B sides. (One of these, "The Bones In The Ground", is an archetypal death-comedy lyric delivered in a mock serious manner.) A later CD edition saw yet more extras thrown in, all of which were demos of tracks originally included and took the listing to a sprawling twenty four titles.

Track listing

#"Nocturne (Prelude)"
#"Sometimes I Wish I Was a Pretty Girl"
#"Cathedral"
#"Uncorrected Personality Traits"
#"Sounds Great When You're Dead"
#"Flavour of Night"
#"Ye Sleeping Knights of Jesus"
#"Mellow Together"
#"Winter Love"
#"The Bones in the Ground"
#"My Favorite Buildings"
#"I Used to Say I Love You"
#"This Could Be the Day"
#"Trams of Old London"
#"Furry Green Atom Bowl"
#"Heart Full of Leaves"
#"Autumn Is Your Last Chance"
#"I Often Dream of Trains"
#"Nocturne (Demise)"