Singled Out: Doug Keith's The Lucky Ones

The song, "The Lucky Ones," came together really fast to the point where I spent a lot of time working on more verses and created this whole key change ending, both of which were scrapped because I thought it had formed a little too quickly. My original intention was do this song with my old band, Up The Empire, and my approach to writing for that band was a bit more uptempo than things I had been writing for my solo stuff. When I played it for the guys in Up The Empire, they were into it, but it would have fit awkwardly in what we were doing at the time which was more of a melodic distorted sound with heavy pounding drums. After trying to get it together with them a few times, I realized that I had written something that was somewhere between what I was doing solo and what Up The Empire was doing and so I took it back and used that as the catalyst song to build up my second solo record around. That decision was really freeing for me because it opened the door to more driving songs like "Maria del Bosco" as well as mellower songs like "The Lowest Low." It helped to push things in a new direction.

I had originally demoed this song as just two guitars, organ and vocals (I made a video using that demo actually) and then decided that I wanted to push this song with moving bass line and pounding drums. Ben Lord who plays the drums with me is a very driving drummer and I like the way the drum part in this song doesn't focus on the cymbals. They're in there occasionally to add some flavor, but for example in the chorus, it is just boom boom boom on the toms and kick drum until it switches back to the verses.

I'm always hesitant to give the full background of what the lyrics to my songs are about because there is often a surface meaning to the lyrics, but that's propped up by what I'm actually writing about and that is very much the case when it comes to this song. On the surface, it's a song about a couple going out for the night, but I used that storyline as a way to explore some other things that were going on in my head at the time.