God Is Luck, the new record from Sean Sprecher’s Bad History Month project, seemingly begins mid-note, as if the music was already being played as you stumbled upon its opening track. It’s a pertinent start-point because, in many ways, God Is Luck exists firmly within that realm, many of the songs pulled directly from improvisation before being twisted into the mysterious shapes we find here on the finished record. Recorded between the summer of 2020 and the summer of 2022, God Is Luck is an exercise in artistic freedom. The songs came quickly and easily by design, the whole point of the record and the approach to simply let go.
The third Bad History Month LP – following Old Blues (2020) – where aspects of the new album mirror the shape of Sprecher’s previous work, its creation was an altogether different experience for the Philadelphia-via-Boston songwriter. He describes it as a collaboration with ‘luck’, the freeform nature of the recording resulting in a process that felt “fun and easy and fearless in a way that recording had never been.”
Where Old Blues was, at its core, a record about self-forgiveness, the fourteen-song God Is Luck LP once again sets out to reframe the world as Sprecher has so often seen it, this time delving into what good can come to us when we let go of the reins and choose to see the good in things rather than giving negative feelings equal ground. “It’s an apt metaphor for how to live a happier life, which informed the ideas in songs,” Sprecher says of the new album. “A person can choose a perspective on any situation and, given that all circumstances have positive and negative aspects, a person can frame their situation as lucky. The highest magic is the alchemy of changing your perspective to always feel lucky.”
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