Nine Hundred Songs You Never Heard

Lyrics

[Intro]
(a pen. Then another pen. Then a great many pens.)

[Verse 1]
Three thousand songs. That is the number she used and she used it lightly,
the way you would mention how many miles you drive to work.
Nobody has ever done the full count. The estate will spend years on it.
She wrote in cars, in kitchens, on planes, on the backs of other people's paperwork.

[Chorus]
Nine hundred you never heard. Two thousand you never heard. Pick your number.
For every song that got out there is a drawer with the ones that did not,
and she did not throw them away, and she did not think they were bad,
she simply wrote faster than the world could put records out.

[Verse 2]
She said the trick was that she never waited to feel like it.
She said inspiration is real but it is unreliable and she could not build a life on it,
so she treated it as a trade — you sit, you work, you finish the thing,
and some days you get two, and most days you get most of one.

[Chorus]
Nine hundred you never heard. And she owned them. Every one. Velvet Apple.
She got her publishing early and she never let it go, not once, not for anybody,
which is why an eighteen-year-old off a bus from Sevier County
died as one of the wealthiest self-made women in American music.

[Bridge]
And I want that on the record next to the wigs and the jokes and the theme park,
because the thing that made all of the rest of it possible
was a woman who sat down every single day of her life and did the work,
and who was never, not once, in her entire career, out of material.

[Outro]
(the pens keep going after the music stops)
Three thousand.
Nobody has counted them.
They are still finding them.