Shiny & New Turns 2: #4 "First Train Home" - Imogen Heap

"The urge to feel your face / In blood, rushing to paint my handprint"

Of all the many modes of public transport (bus, tram, airplane, coach, rocket, shuttle, golfcart) the medium I have perhaps utilised most often in my lifetime is: the train. This is because I'm a middle class university student who in his first year of study went home to get his washing done every month (CLICHÉ ALERT) but also because I've been in a long-term and, more pertinently, long-distance relationship for the past two years (don't believe the myth, they do work). Travelling by train is wonderful, perhaps not in every country (although I've experienced spectacular ones in New Zealand and Japan) but especially in England. All that lush countryside, an occasional spattering of rain. You can read without getting motion sickness. You can eavesdrop, and even nowadays plug in your laptop if you're that addicted to technology.

And no, this is not covert train product placement: I could write an essay on how dreadfully overpriced tickets are, how awful and rude and jobsworthy some of the staff can be and how slow and late they often seem to be. But there is something about taking them - that sense of possibility those glimpses you get into other people's lives (both fellow passengers and whatever civilization you might pass on your journey), and that excitement about what lies at the other end. Imogen Heap, an unfairly skilled songwriter and criminally underrated sonic innovator released "First Train Home" in 2009 and it was met mostly with disappointment. After her almost breakthrough on previous album, Speak For Yourself, punters (perhaps understandably) craved something akin to "Hide & Seek" - a masterpiece of a song, if now, irritatingly overexposed - which made her a relative star when it was used in the finale for that show about those bored teenagers in California exploring, as some old article in the Guardian Guide once said, every nuance of the word 'hey'.

But to me "First Train Home" wasn't a disappointment. It eschews high-concept production gimmicks for a sonic landscape that sounds unique but familiar (like train carriages, platforms and stations... do you see where I'm going with this?) and a sense of overarching narrative that is also satisfyingly circular (it feels like it returns from whence it came(th)). The song may not be about a young gay idiote returning, melancholy but ecstatic from a weekend with his boyfriend, but as is often the case with music I love, the lyrics and specific meanings melted away as I put this on repeat, and the feel of the whole thing enveloped me.