A couple of times in my life I’ve written about factories and blue collar working life (as Bruce Springsteen would describe it). Often it has taken me to be away from the environment I’m writing about in order to see it clearly. The same was true of this song…
And so I sat with a bottle of red wine looking out over the Pacific and the words came to me. We’d gone on holiday for about three weeks, a road trip that took in California, the Grand Canyon (which we walked down, and back up), Utah, New Mexico and the most amazing scenery. The experience was fantastic, a truly once in a lifetime holiday but we were going to be living out of a car and various motels for three plus weeks. The first day we landed in LA we drove to a guitar shop in Santa Monica and I attempted to buy a cheap guitar. The plan was to buy it, play it for three weeks and sell it back to the shop at the end.
I thought I might get a song out of America, as usual I wrote about where I wasn’t. The guitar part for the ‘Losing Streak’ might have come from having played ‘Patience of Angels’ a song made popular by Eddie Reader, but written by Boo Hewerdine. Around that time I was playing it a lot, but I’m not really sure. The only direct steal in the song is a lyrical one and bizarrely comes from ‘The Fairy-tale of New York’, at beginning of that tune while the scene is being set up there’s the line:
‘got on a lucky one, came in eighteen to one’
The imagery of that opening verse of a lonely man in the drunk tank just felt right for a song called ‘Losing Streak’. At the time I didn’t realise it but there is a reference to Christmas in the song, and maybe that was some residual stuff that came in from lifting that line; I do know that the Christmas line was from a memory I had of working nights at Tesco.
Lyrically this is a list song, which are sometimes easier to write. It’s just a list of jobs that I’ve done, thought about and imagined. The fun part is figuring out which ones I might have done.
I would like to point out the electric guitar coming in on the second verse sounding like George Harrison and the string arrangements. Kris Wright wrote the scores for the strings and directed how they would then be played. They were tracked with Adam Robinson recording both violins and viola parts and Martin then putting the cello on. It’s an upbeat number but the strings really bring the sense of the ominous to it. As the string lines were being written on the scores, Kris’s handwriting was a little difficult to read, with the end result being that the viola player thought he was putting tracks down on a song called ‘Losing Shrek’, maybe one day I’ll write that one!
We finished off our holiday and went back to the guitar shop to sell my guitar back. The man who I’d bought it from managed to sell me a flight case costing twice as much as the guitar. So I brought it home, and the new song.
Listen to Losing Streak:
Song Writing John Hardy 
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