10 Perfect Rock Songs That Were Written By Accident
4. Even the Losers - Tom Petty
If you were to ask any of the Heartbreakers what the hardest record they've ever made was, Damn the Torpedoes would be a pretty safe bet. As much as some of their most identifiable tracks were on here, it was murder trying to get them on tape while also dealing with the fallout of their label breathing down their neck outside of the studio. When you're living and breathing rock and roll like that though, sometimes you can get bits of blind inspiration.
As the band was workshopping all of the songs, Even the Losers was still barely a finished song, with Tom Petty just having the verses of the tune without any way to stitch them together. Even when the band started to actually record the song, Tom had not written a thing for the chorus and hadn't told anyone that he hadn't finished it. Once the band came in on the chorus though, Tom just sporadically sang 'even the losers get lucky sometimes,' which worked just as well as everything else on the record.
When Tom was asked about it later, he was just amazed at how off the cuff the whole thing turned out, especially since that lyric seemed to wrap the entire song up without him realizing it. Tom may be a great songwriter in his own right, but there might be some divine spirit of rock and roll at play on this one.