Train Song

"Train Song" was written by Vashti Bunyan and Alasdair Clayre and issued on Columbia in 1966, credited to Vashti. By Songfacts' account, Bunyan had written an earlier version, "17 Pink Sugar Elephants", with her Ruskin School friend Jenny Lewis, and the lyric came from a poem by Clayre, whom she had met at Ruskin; the royalties are split between Bunyan, Lewis and Clayre's nephew. Bunyan wrote of the original writing session in her book Wayward: magic everywhere. Of its slow success she told Songfacts in 2023: it's grown without me having to do anything for it at all. It did not chart in 1966.

It reached a wide audience after Just Another Diamond Day was reissued in 2000, and it has been used in many places. Songfacts lists a Reebok advertisement, a 2008 NFL spot, Waterloo Road in 2013, True Detective and Parenthood in 2014, and Amazon's Patriot as the opening theme; Wikipedia adds a Samsung television advertisement in 2011 and dates the Reebok advertisement to 2014. Ben Gibbard and Feist covered it on the 2009 charity compilation Dark Was the Night. Bunyan recorded it again in 2004 for Folk Rock and Faithfull: Dream Babes Vol. 5, and a 2:12 version was on the 2017 Patriot EP. Songfacts counted over 18 million Spotify streams.

Our upload is a Topic channel audio of the 1966 studio recording; the likeliest source is the 2007 compilation, though that is inferred. The 2004 re-recording is a different recording. We found no video, live history or setlist.fm count.