Singled Out: Scott Lucas & the Married Men (Local H)

We called this song 'Mustang Pavement' for a long time. Randy (he's the drummer) thought the chords sounded like a Pavement song--and I wanted to steal the bass'n'drum (NOT drum'n'bass) groove from 'Mustang Sally'. Everybody else seems to think the finished product sounds more like Ian McCulloch's 80s. So, I guess we're pretty good at either concealing our influences, or totally missing the mark.

I have this weird habit of always writing the "single" last. Maybe it's some kind of subconscious thing stemming from the way I always used to wait until the last minute to do my homework in high school. So in that grand tradition, this turned out to be the last one written for the record. I suppose it DOES stick out a little from the other songs-it's a bit more upbeat than the others-and aside from our Dylan cover ('Positively 4th Street'); it's definitely the most "rocking" track on the record.....which--given the laid back mood of the record--really isn't saying much.

I still didn't have lyrics when we went into the studio-so this was the only song tracked without a vocal. Which was fine--this song seems impossible for me to sing and play at the same time, anyway. It's a bit below my range and in order to croon it oh-so-correctly, I have to concentrate like crazy. Singing low is f***ing hard.

The lyrics deal with the usual list of things : breaking up, getting back together, shacking up, getting married. But I think it's mainly about how the bad times turn out to be the good times. I started with the lines :

"Driving through the blizzard of luck
Crawl among the jack-knifed semi-trucks"

Which is a reference to a trip to my parents' house that my girlfriend and I took one Christmas. It was snowing like crazy and we thought we were gonna die. There were semi-trucks everywhere--it was like some kind of elephant graveyard. We were petrified. But that turned out to be one of my favorite moments of us. And I think that's what the song tries to address : skewed memories and shared perspectives. s*** like that. There's also references to neighborhood gossip and our bad luck with restaurants thrown in for color-but the song basically sprang from that terrifying Christmas drive. Songs are weird.