Notebook Thursday: Chucking It All, Almost

I found the first draft of "Got Lucky" this week, and decided to post it here because—though I remembered that the song needed revision—I had forgotten it was such a mess. This shows just how much I had to throw away to arrive at the final version.

At upper right is the chorus. If you read music, you might notice that the notes against the D and Bm chords aren't the recorded melody—they're the harmony that Charlie sings. I kept jumping up to the F# when I played the song, and it took a while to figure out that it wasn't actually a mistake. (Charlie says "Alone Again Or" developed this way too.) 

The early verses I might as well have ripped out of the notebook entirely. ("No one ever swept me up / They always swiped away"? Eesh.) At top left are a bunch of rhymes I didn't use. A little lower is the part where I realized I'd accidentally plagiarized a rhyme from "9 to 5." On the right things get Westerberg-ish with "All they ever took from me was everything I owned," which might be worth using in some other song. At the bottom is "They'll tell you there's a lid for every pot / That's how you know you've lost the plot." Which I don't hate, but perhaps ought to. Anyway, it's not in the final song.

The page was crowded enough with competing ideas that I had to start a new one. Every so often it happens that way. I used a different notebook—bigger, with more white space—and copied only the lines I was pretty sure I wanted to keep. I filled in the other stuff later (which you can tell, since the ink color is different). And this version, too, had a couple of things that didn't take.

Things I kept from the first draft: 

1. The title
2. The bridge (still my favorite part)
3. The chord progression
4. The lyrics for the first verse (which you can tell was a late-breaking idea, by the way it's wedged into the space in the gutter of the first notebook)

Even the bottom version isn't final, because it doesn't have the false Bm ending—that was a suggestion from Charlie the first time I brought it to the whole band. Every so often, finishing a song takes a level of persistence that verges on foolhardy. It's kind of fitting that it happened with this one, a song about striking gold after years of striking out.

​The Unswept will play "Got Lucky" in their April 23 set at International Pop Overthrow, Montrose Saloon, Chicago.