Scott Andrew - lo-fi acoustic pop superhero!

Our last song circle assignment was to write a pop song. I had a great idea for a pop-country tune a la Rascal Flatts, but punted at the last minute when I couldn’t come up with enough verses. That’s probably for the best.

So in an 11th-hour panic (I was still writing lyrics minutes before I hit the road), I instead completed “A Good Thing,” which is a song I’ve been messing around with on and off for years.

You know how sometimes you visit a place you used to live, like a city or another country, and you’re reminded of an old romance or crush you might have had there, and you wonder if that person is still there among all those thousands of people? That’s more or less this song in a nutshell. Fun fact: I wrote the chorus during jury duty.

Two guitars in stereo, tracked with an Epiphone Masterbilt AJ500M that a guy loaned to me for a test drive (thanks, Joe). At an epic five minutes it’s too long for a radio single; I might cut the last half of the first chorus and some of the intro stuff. Lyrics are below.

A Good Thing

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the sun sinks slips behind the clouds
and I’ve been driving around for hours
in this city where we met so long ago
and the streets here hum like wires
and the last 12 years unwind
I am haunting the old places we would go

and I can’t invent
the words to say how much it meant
just to be there beside you breathing in
each moment that we spent

and we had a good thing
you told me so
but what did I know?
what did I know?
yeah we had a good thing
but we let it go
so what do I know?
what do I know?

the waves crash against the pier
and I’ve been gone all these years
a familiar skyline holds no sense of mystery
and you’re fading in and out
like a signal, like the radio
the shadows of the long-forgotten ghosts
we used to be

and I never had
a reason I should feel so sad
you can have every street and sidewalk
if you wanted them so bad

and we had a good thing
you told me so
but what did I know?
what did I know?
yeah we had a good thing
but we let it go
so what do I know?
what do I know?

and I guess this city’s big enough without you
and I guess this city’s big enough without you

and we had a good thing
you told me so
but what did I know?
what did I know?
yeah we had a good thing
but we let it go
so what do I know?
what do I know?