Sometimes I Dream of Trains
A Long-Standing Fixationby Julia Sprung B’28published on November 8th, 2025
A Long-Standing Fixationby Julia Sprung B’28published on November 8th, 2025
Though Hitchcock mines and exposes his own peculiarities, his songs cling without hesitation to a human world. Form and cultural reference are the indispensable vehicles of melody; he presents a salad of Christianity and Freud that preserves a reverence for the divine, while exposing the silliness of human attempts to approach it. The didactic drone of “Uncorrected Personality Traits” belies its wild leaps of logic; only the shrill conclusion of each stanza reveals the desperate glee with which he foresees total disaster. The bridge, conducted entirely in this tone, reviews the progression of human life and plunges forth armed with a sense of total understanding. “Ye Sleeping Knights of Jesus” moves from snark covert to nihilism overt; but the song’s attitude is one of affirmation and contentment–a complacent country twang rules the day. It is in catastrophe that Hitchcock discovers casual human unity. “Put your faith in death because it’s free, ” he says. But in the end, the sleeping knights “look as though they’ve noticed me.”
His interest in the minds of others is not always subtle. “Sometimes I wish I was a pretty girl / So I could [grunt] myself in the shower”—he wishes not only to understand the object of desire but to become it; his vision is one not only of satisfaction but of the wholeness that precedes any notion of desire. And indeed it is dangerous to be alone: “Been on my own so long / I can’t tell left from wrong.” He may ridicule other minds, but he cannot disregard them: “In the cathedral of your mind / All the worshippers are blind.” Intellectual weakness does not obscure full and particular operation. Hitchcock still wants to understand.
A plea in favor of the album as an institution is now in order. Most albums, I find, aren’t worth listening to all the way through. I’ll do it once, in order to understand the logic particular to it. But it is usually boring, if not frightening, to descend so completely into the shape of another mind. Self-indulgent pop ballads, encountered individually, bring the pleasure of abandoning the responsibilities that inhere in idiosyncrasy; too many at once can induce pain. Any expression of feeling is to be the true expression of it. This is perhaps why I prefer the complete albums of bands to those of individual artists; it is easier to mediate between the band’s collective psyche and your own. In a way, you could say, their creative conflicts prefigure the challenge that any mind faces in really feeling the external.
But Hitchcock’s theory of mind operates through the progression that he has chosen. The order of the album mimics the psychogeography of a moody, performatively self-aware adolescent—someone who, in their profound self-absorption, also seeks desperately to commune with the world. “Nocturne” begins and ends the album; within its jar of sadness nestle ironic love and self-doubting optimism. Hitchcock dreams of trains under many circumstances, but the preoccupation that he expresses cannot exist in isolation: “I often dream of trains when I’m with you / I wonder if you dream about them too.” There is a you-ness that defines the I-ness. The very move to render the external internal, to take anything as the subject of a dream, exists as a prelude to the higher mandate: relating to others. There is a “you” in nearly every song on the album. The “you” explicitly derided or disregarded gradually yields to those both mocked and cherished; the funny songs give way to ones equally reflective but with a greater sense that instant, once recognized, is already lost. It’s a tremendously personal album and one that I’ve always encountered with a shock of recognition—though I don’t know whether I have remade myself in Hitchcock's image or whether we are both copies of some unrelenting human quirk. In my dreams, I often walk up to others, those whom in the waking world I find unwilling to disclose themselves. And in sleep, we stand very close to each other and need not say a word, because we know that we have both dreamt of trains. And I will admit, in a whisper, that for this reason I am always slightly reluctant to recommend the album. It is a strange thing to encounter in real life those whom you recognize from dreams.