lyrics

i / been trying to call you / get you on the phone

couldn’t get you alone/ couldn’t get you at all

i was just trying to break through

i can’t get over the wall

couldn’t get through to tell you / that your

shotgun lover took another one to cover up the  pain that he couldn’t hide

you wished him well / gave him a kiss and a shell

with his name inscribed on the side

and you said sellout / you can get the hell out now

i can find my way alone

but you’re a little girl lost in the wilderness now

and I don’t think you’re coming home

oh no

ooh / i see the way that they watch you

counting up the cost/the lines you shouldn’t have crossed

’cause right now, there’s nothing else waiting to come due

you’re paying for what you’ve done

girl I was walkin/you better run/run and tell ’em that your

shotgun lover took another one to cover up the  pain that he couldn’t hide

you wished him well / gave him a kiss and a shell

with his name inscribed on the side

the one who sold out / I couldn’t hold out

left you the queen of rock’n’roll

but you’re a little girl broke on the boulevard now

and you already sold your soul

yeah you’re a little girl

and you’re losin’ it

spending up something so real

like it was counterfeit

like it never meant nothing at all

story

I’m a big believer in the power of mystery and well-intentioned obfuscation when it comes to music. I love songs where the lyrics are clearly about something – there’s an internal logic that relates the verses to each other, and the choruses – even if you don’t know exactly what the song is about.

But.

Some people really, really want to know what a song is about, and, specially for them (and because otherwise I’d have nothing to write about here), I’ll tell you that Shotgun is about Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love.

This is definitely not something I ever intended to write a song about, but I was walking past a bookstore one morning, I saw Courtney Love dressed in some super high-fashion outfit on a magazine cover, and an entire verse and chorus assembled themselves before my very ears.

The interesting thing is that it actually…wasn’t this song. It was a song about clothes, a terrible song, and I banged my head against it for a week before suddenly, while sitting at my keyboard of pain, started playing this song instead. . I think I wrote the whole thing in about an hour ( an hour and a week…). Weird.