I’ve packed a bag to get away from a feeling before. I booked a flight once at 11pm on a random Tuesday because I needed to wake up somewhere that didn’t smell like his particular brand of bullshit, the smile-while-he’s-shrinking-you thing I could not stop replaying. There is something about moving your body through geography when your head won’t shut the hell up. Like if you can just get far enough away, maybe the thoughts will lose signal. And then you step off a train in some beautiful place you’ve never been, and the world is just so damn big, and somehow that helps more than any conversation ever did. Lilia Rose wrote ‘Train to Lagos’ after a solo trip to Portugal, and she described it as “reflecting on a past relationship having the excitement of being in a completely new place and simultaneously experiencing the feeling of letting go.” That sentence made me put my phone down for a second because yeah, that’s the whole thing.
She opens on a train going somewhere new and you can hear that mix of freedom and low-grade heartache underneath every note. She sings “I took a train to Lagos I couldn’t hold it in / I was on my way to somewhere I’d never been.” The production is warm and moving like the window seat view of coastline you weren’t expecting. And her voice has this quality I’d describe as soft and completely sure of itself at the same time which is honestly the hottest combination a woman can have.
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Then the song does this gorgeous thing where the past finds her anyway. She’s in Lisbon, minding her business, probably drinking something cold and feeling good about herself, and a stranger casually mentions him. She doesn’t fall apart. She just writes it: “He said this guy is from Colorado and he puts up quite the fight / And I knew it was you and the memories flooded in / And I stood up from the room and excused myself again.” The way she holds that moment, walking out of the room instead of unraveling, is so fucking composed. She’s somewhere in the middle and honest about it. She just chooses herself instead. I’m auditing my choices just reading this.
The chorus is where it gets seductive and I mean that in the most specific way. ” Wherever I go I wanna leave you so far away from here / I’ll travel alone and I won’t answer the phone / You won’t see me around anymore. “ There’s something deeply attractive about a woman who decides she’s done and then actually goes. Not dramatically. Not with a speech. She just gets on the train and disappears into a life that has nothing to do with him. That energy is sexy as hell and Lilia delivers it with this low unhurried confidence that makes you want to book a flight immediately. Add her to your rotation and your whole travel budget.
The second verse is where the song earns its keep. She sings “I stepped out into Lagos I walked across the bridge / The world was at my fingertips I found myself again.” That line in her voice is a full-body moment. Then she goes somewhere even better: “Making friends with strangers, I was laughing till I cried / I want to keep this feeling in the forefront of my mind.” The laughing-until-crying thing is the real intimacy here. That’s what it feels like when you realize you’re going to be okay without him and the relief is so overwhelming your body doesn’t know what to do. She said traveling alone felt “really empowering,” and you hear that empowerment as something earned. This altered my brain chemistry slightly and I’m choosing to let it.
The pre-chorus before the final chorus is the emotional gut punch. She’s clear-eyed about why she had to go – “And I knew it was me, I needed to feel free / From the thoughts inside my mind / And what you said wasn’t true, but it’s what you wanna do / And it gets me every time.” She knows his shit isn’t accurate. She knows she’s been letting it get to her anyway. That’s the honest, painful middle ground between knowing better and actually being free, and she writes it without flinching.
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Lilia Rose is the kind of woman who just goes where the feeling takes her and with over eight years of performing and 500+ gigs across Virginia, Colorado, Thailand, and now San Diego, she’s clearly been somewhere worth following. Her original music is melodic and deeply personal with songs that make you feel like you’re reading someone’s diary and you cannot put it the fuck down. Fleetwood Mac, Alanis Morissette, and Vance Joy are in her DNA and you hear it the second she opens her mouth. She’s been holding down San Diego stages from Soda Bar to La Valencia Hotel and she’s got new original music dropping this year.
The song ends on two words: “Close that door.” And goddamn, does that close it. There is no long goodbye or explanations. She walked across a bridge in Lagos and felt the world get enormous around her and came back to herself. The door closes from the inside.
I did eventually get on that flight. Woke up somewhere completely new, had two drinks I didn’t have to explain myself to him to get, and felt the noise start to quiet down in a way I hadn’t managed in months. ‘Train to Lagos’ knows that feeling. It’s the sound of getting your own signal back.
