Luke Doucet & Melissa McClelland "Broken One"

I am, like most nerds, vehemently against the George Lucas school of "updating your classic" with new content, to somehow make it more relevant and likeable.

That goes for songs too.

Generally, there is no need to add a verse to update your fans on how the characters in the song turned out or change the lyrics to make the narrator more sympathetic.

But I have to give some credit to Luke Doucet, and to his wife Melissa McClelland, for taking "Broken One" one step further.

I wish I could find the prologue that I heard Doucet do in concert, to his song "Broken One." But the gist of it was this:

He and his singer-songwriter girlfriend broke up. To get through the pain, he wrote an album's worth of tunes about their relationship. He called her up and asked if he could play them for her. It seemed only fair, if he was going to be playing these songs to audiences, that she should hear them first.

When he finished, she leveled this zinger:

"Do you know how many songs I've written about you? None. You need to get over it and move on."

And that led him to write "Broken One" in the form you hear below.


Hear the original on Youtube.

Flash forward a couple of years, and Doucet is now in a relationship with Melissa McClelland. They become husband and wife and they tour together. And every night, she has to stand awkwardly on stage as he tells this story (an abbreviated version, below), and then sing harmony vocals as he goes on and on about some other girl.

Awkward!


Hear a live version with Melissa on Youtube.

Finally, she suggests a slight rewrite, and damn it, if it isn't right for the song.

A few simple lyric changes, and a slight arrangement change to make it more of a male/female duet, with the female's lyrical voice more actively heard, and suddenly the song isn't as one-sided, not quite as bitter, and certainly more palatable for McClelland to sing.

It's an evolution that has produced a stronger species of song.

Nicely done!


Hear Doucet and McClelland perform under the name "Whitehorse" on Youtube.