Tune Tuesday

My home state has produced some of the most amazing artists and music of the past 75 years. As a Michigander (Michiganian?), I consider Bob Seger to be Rock and Roll Royalty. In all the years I listened to his music and played his music on the radio, I had never seen him in concert.

A few years back, when he did his farewell tour, a radio pal asked if I wanted to go see his show in Saginaw. I jumped at the chance and was NOT disappointed. Despite his age, he still sounded amazing. It was a show I will never forget.

A song I have not featured by Bob is a great one called Beautiful Loser. It was the title track to his 1975 album.

Bob says, “A lot of people think I wrote ‘Beautiful Loser’ about myself. I got the idea for that song from a book of Leonard Cohen poetry by the same name. The song was about underachievers in general. I very rarely write about myself that much. I draw on my own experiences like anyone else, but I’m not what you’d call auteuristic. I’m not like my songs at all. I’m a lot more up person than what I write.”

Songfacts says: Seger took almost a year to write this. He played around with many different arrangements of the song until he got it right. In a 1994 interview with Music Connection, he explained:

“I’ve never written the lyrics and tried to build the music around that. It’s usually a feel or a verse or a chorus, and the lyrics will come after I’ve decided that a certain pattern or groove or rhythm is cool. Then I’ll start singing gibberish over that and just find a lyrical idea that fits the ideas that I started out with.

Other times I’ll just sit down and say, ‘I wanna write a song called this.’ That’s how ‘Beautiful Loser’ happened. I just loved the title, which I got from a book of poetry from Leonard Cohen called Beautiful Losers, with an ‘s,’ and I thought it was a really cool title. Actually, I wrote three or four songs called ‘Beautiful Loser’ until I came up with the one that worked. But that’s a pretty rare thing.”