From Robyn on Patreon on 2025
Here’s the remixed version of “Luminous Rose” which appears on the forthcoming Globe of Frogs (Remixed & Remastered). It’s the same vocal as on the original A&M release and incorporates some of the same keyboard overdubs, but now features a backing track that had lain buried for 38 years.
I remember walking through Bloomsbury in London in the autumn of 1987, listening to a rough mix cassette of this on a Walkman. It didn’t sound quite right. The music was too complicated to mix, so we wound up shedding the entire backing track and just keeping the overdubs. In the days of tape, it could take a long time to set up and balance a mix, but now that everything on the recording console is digital, any combination of instruments can be set up, changed, recalled or mutated. So it took very little time for Brad Jones, who was remixing the song here in Nashville, to get the old multitrack into the shape that had eluded us way back in the 20th Century.
Here it is, a tale of a serviceman drowned in the amorous grasp of the ocean, and slowly dissolving in the lungs of the sea. But the singer remains on land, in the twilight, somewhere on the South Coast of England.