Behind The Songs - Has Beens

Many of the songs that make up Third World Sun’s first CD took a circuitous route to get to where they are today. Indeed most of them even continue to evolve since we recorded them as we continue to play them live. Because of this, I wanted to document how these songs came about before I forget and it all just becomes a blur. - Carhart 

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Has Beens (Johnson, Driml, Carhart, Carhart)

In Launch Pad’s most formative time, when Lori and I were still leading worship at our church and we were trying to put together a band for this outside project we wanted to create, Lori asked a neighbor kid’s father if he thought his son might want to play in our band. Well, apparently the kid’s dad did ask him. We could hear him in the backyard laughing with his friends and siblings, saying, “Man, I don’t wanna play with no has beens.” Ah. If only we had ever been… And that’s how Has Beens came about. It was one of our first songs. It was mostly my piece. The lyrics are all mine and most of the chords as well (Lori may have improved a few of them). The song meant to be humorous, as is evidenced by the final verse (“at least in our heads, that’s how it goes”). Lori initially liked the song but as we continued to write new material, she tired of it. I think she wanted more worshipful stuff and Has Beens just wasn’t all that “spiritual” to her. We actually had a disagreement about retiring the song from the Launch Pad repertoire (along with another song called Little Miss Sunshine that did not make it onto the TWS CD). Scott and Mike both liked the song and argued to keep it as well. But Lori won out, mostly because I preferred to sleep in my bed over the couch, and we stopped doing it in Launch Pad. After she passed away and we started Third World Sun, we decided the fastest way to get back up and playing was to revive and retool songs we were already familiar with. So we revived Has Beens and we’ve been playing it ever since. For the record though, we’ve still never been.