When I was a teenager, I wrote a rather mopey song about a careless driver who accidentally kills some children, then tries to commit suicide out of guilt, but fails. It was a very teenage-Dale song.
The lyrics went like this:
I never saw this coming / I had my headlights on / A flash of children running / A frantic spinning stop / The first one died on impact / Bisected at the waist / The sudden horror frozen / Forever on her face
Paralyzed by this fear / By all accounts I should have died / But I'm still here
I never saw this coming / The way the world went wrong / The terrors that distract me / The days that last too long / When food has lost all flavor / And colors fade to white / I found the obvious answer / But couldn't get it right
Paralyzed by this fear / By all accounts I should have died / But I'm still here
Sheesh.
Based on the theme of surviving when perhaps you wish you hadn't, I named the song, "A New Lease on Life (with No Escape Clause)".
The song, for reasons we can only speculate on, failed to crack the Billboard Hot 100. I ended up scrapping it. But many years later, when I conceived of a story about a woman who is reborn with memories of her prior life intact, and who, rather than make use of this knowledge in a wise way, just makes more mistakes, I decided to reuse only the title.
That story, and the old song itself, of course had nothing in common. But I'm fond of digging through the rubble of prior flawed efforts to salvage reusable bits, working them into new (and also inevitably flawed) work. In this case, something about the title was difficult to discard.
The story's been through a few iterations and revisions, but it's finally been published. You can read it here on the Bright Flash Literary Review website. I'm glad it's found a home.
I was also glad, until today, that nobody but me had ever seen those lyrics. Oops.