"Dance music, in this context, nods toward the danse macabre, the idea that we are all dancing toward certain doom. Camille Saint-Saëns’s famous Danse macabre (1874) is probably the most well-known musical rendering of this idea, and it also has a distinctly waltzy meter and melody. But “Phantom Train” is closer in spirit to one of Shostakovich’s “jazz” waltzes—which, though they do sound a bit spooky to the modern ear, are not explicitly death-related."