Years ago, in my early 20’s, I took out an ad in a long-gone Seattle area music magazine called The Rocket to find a songwriting partner. It was a fertile time in my life in that I had an easy-going job and little responsibility. A girlfriend had recently broken up with me, something that can generate a lot of angsty, post-adolescent song lyrics. I got a couple of replies, including one that yielded several meetings with a young singer about my age. We wrote several songs together, including one that he told me some relative of his started playing in a band in Europe. I never really knew where that went…

Anyway, our partnership ended when my job was lost to technology and I moved from Seattle to start college. I kept writing song lyrics on and off for years, though. And a couple of years ago I reached out via an online site to Seattle-area musicians looking for a lyricist. Again, I got a couple of replies. And again, one yielded a couple of rough demos of some song lyrics I wrote while in college.

Like before, other things took precedence and the potential songwriting partnership drifted away before it could solidify. Then today, while cleaning up some email, I found one of the demos. I listened to it for the first time in two years and found it kind of engaging, reminding me that this itch for my creativity still wants to be scratched.

The song is called “Not to Prepared to Lose.” I wrote the original lyric in 1985 and it’s been sitting in a notebook with dozens of other songs, some pretty horrible and others with some potential merit, since. My co-writer is Bob Kopatich. He wrote the music and is doing the singing and guitar playing. He changed a couple of lines to suit his phrasing and his understanding of the song.

Take a listen:

The image I’ve used here is a “Wordle,” or word cloud, created of the song lyrics.