Robyn Hitchcock - Crystal Branches - Non-Album Tracks (1984)

Here's the next in my long series of stray tracks albums from Robyn Hitchcock.

In 1984, Hitchcock released the all acoustic album "I Often Dream of Trains." It gave his solo career a rebirth, after he lost direction with his previous album and didn't put any new music for two years.

Whenever I can in this series, I post two albums for each official Hitchcock album: a stray tracks album, and an album of acoustic versions of the songs from the official album. Since the official album is acoustic to begin with, the acoustic version is moot. But here's the stray tracks album.

Probably a lot of Hitchcock fans would consider many of these songs part of "I Often Dream of Trains." That's because most of them have been added as bonus tracks on various rereleases of the album. But in fact the original album was only 39 minutes long, and these stray tracks make up another 36 minutes. The first song, "Star of Hairs," is done with a full band, but the rest are acoustic, just like the official album.

In my opinion, "I Often Dream of Trains" is one of Hitchcock's very best albums, and it is critically acclaimed. This album is very nearly as good. When Hitchcock would play the "Trains" album live in concert in 2008 (and release it as the live album "I Often Dream of Trains in New York"), he would play many of these songs too.

By the way, the album title I chose, "Crystal Branches," was selected because that was a title Hitchcock considered for the "Trains" album. Those words are mentioned in the song "Winter Love," which actually didn't make it on the official album but is one of the stray tracks here, so that works out nicely.

01 Star of Hairs (Robyn Hitchcock)
02 Mellow Together (Robyn Hitchcock)
03 Winter Love (Robyn Hitchcock)
04 The Bones in the Ground (Robyn Hitchcock)
05 My Favourite Buildings (Robyn Hitchcock)
06 I Used to Say I Love You (Robyn Hitchcock)
07 Chant - Aether (Robyn Hitchcock)
08 Not Even a Nurse (Robyn Hitchcock)
09 Slow Chant - That's Fantastic Mother Church (Robyn Hitchcock)
10 Traveller's Fare (Robyn Hitchcock)
11 Surgery (Robyn Hitchcock)
12 The Unpleasant Stain (Robyn Hitchcock)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15122097/RobynH_1984b_CrystalBrnchesAcoustic_atse.zip.html

To come up with cover art for this album, I had a vision of actual "crystal branches," so I Googled that term and found the above photo. The caption for the photo, which I cropped, is: "Background from crystal branches of pair snowflake in microscope."