Words and Music by Eg

I wrote this song to give Lisa something to sing solo.  This was the 
first song that I had ever written for someone else to sing.  I wanted 
to write something gritty that showed the underbelly of addiction but that also continued the narrative on through into recovery.  That is the beauty of this song—is how much recovery can and does transform lives.  There are literally thousands of couples around the world that have and are living this song—both the violence and the hopelessness and the miracle of recovery in a marriage/relationship.  So that was the premise of the song.  The first version we recorded—with just me on acoustic guitar—Danny came up with the idea of the lyrical interplay between “you’re the second best, you’re the very best thing that ever happened to me.”  I love that image and idea of the antagonist of the song coming home to his wife after a meeting and telling her that she’s the “second best thing.”  Then he goes, “Oh wait…no…you’re the very best thing.”  So, it is a nod to the importance of recovery not only in our own lives but how much of a positive and transformational impact that getting clean and then working a program can have upon a long term relationship.

In early 2008, Lisa and I decided we wanted to take Second Best to the next level.  I had recently me Ken Kelly (producer of some of Sister Hazel’s early music) and had begun discuss the possibility of him producing and recording Second Best at his studios in Clearwater.  Lisa and I scraped together our pennies and we came up with the whole nut for this song ($3000—which now seems like an outrageous lot of money for one song but then we just didn’t know).  We went to the studio and watch Mark Trojanowski and Ali lay down a spectacular bass & drums track.  Ken worked on the skeletal guitars and then we went up and cut vocals.  It took about a month but then the song arrived in my inbox and I have to say that he did a bang up job on producing and engineering this song.  Ken added the middle musical bridge and that has really made this long narrative song hang together nicely.  We are forever indebted to Ken for the fine work he did with this song.

Ken’s recording of Second Best is the only song on the album that was (a) not recorded live and (b) was not done in Nashville in June 2012.   This song appeared, in its current form, on Grace & Grit in 2008.

When it came time to master all the songs for Kleen 2013, I was unable to locate the original work or WAV files for Second Best.  There are no archive copies left.  All we had was an MP3 from Grace & Grit.  God bless Adam Fox and his mad mastering skills.  He took that MP3 and made it sound significantly better than the original with more warmth and vocal presence.  The song not only jumps forward from his TLC, but it also sounds now like the other songs on the album.