⛓️‍💥Lucky Ball and Chain⛓️‍💥

What’s the sense of arguing when you’re all alone?

Another “Country Western” song.

We are three songs into Flood and the thing I got most excited about when I listened to Flood for the first time, was hearing the accordion make its album debut in Lucky Ball and Chain.

Admittedly, I was so against anything resembling country music (even if it was They Might Be Giants) at the time, that I used to tune this out. Just listen along but never fully engage. I couldn’t skip it because it was on a cassette. That is until my first real break up in high school.

Music and Breakups

Of course, breaking up with a girlfriend in highschool after a year isn’t the same as someone dealing with a divorce from the love of their life. It was enough for me to understand the emotion behind it and opened me up to experiencing genres of music I didn’t used to enjoy for reasons unbeknownst to me.

Open ears is something I mention in this newsletter often. Listening to these songs so many times since I was a teenager makes hearing the song almost too familiar.

Noticed something new.

I was walking through the park today, listening to this song and trying to hear it with open ears and I noticed something that made the song more tragic to me. It all came from the first verse of the chorus. A lyric that I’ve heard and sang out loud SO MANY times.

I lost my lucky ball and chain

And now she’s four years gone.

Have you ever dealt with a partner that you love so deeply but they left you and you’re still yearning for that relationship FOUR YEARS later? I can’t relate to that exactly but I’ve had close family die unexpectedly and traumatically that I wasn’t still openly grieving that many years later.

The narrator of this song is in pain and realizing the errors of his ways that have led to his despair. The song itself is an upbeat, happy tuned little number with these little gun shot/ drum hits that I love.

Listen to Lucky Ball and Chain and let me know what think.

What do you think?

Another no-skip classic song off Flood. Spoiler alert: the entire album is no-skip. It may have taken some minor life event’s to initially crack this song open for me, but it eventually a comfort song. Something that I can listen to you and pinpoint each instrument’s part and sing along as if I’m hanging out on the couch with an old friend.