B-Side Guys

Seventeen hours. Ninety-one years. Seventy more, give or take. “Lucky” keeps counting even when the math doesn’t actually explain anything.

Ryan Hoffman’s new single spends its runtime doing arithmetic on a life: how long since someone was left alone, how long a person actually gets, how long the roses take to need trimming again. None of it adds up to purpose. It just adds up.

The song’s own math starts in the first verse: a hypothetical epitaph, a coin-flip between a black suit and a grey one, someone remembered mainly for how hard he searched and how little of it ever got heard. It picks up around the two-minute mark, matching a lyric that’s been sitting patiently with its own dread until it finally has somewhere to go. By the last verse, the numbers turn concrete. Ninety-one years on a headstone. Someone still out there trimming the roses and the moss. “You’ve been lucky, to know. Some get lucky, and some don’t,” Hoffman sings, the closest the song comes to an actual conclusion: an outcome, plain and unexplained, no better accounted for by ninety-one years than by seventeen hours.

This is the first single from Hoffman’s upcoming record, following a debut that looked outward at collective pandemic uncertainty. The Pittsburgh songwriter has always worked in that space between raw and atmospheric, going back to his 2016 debut, “The Pines.” “Lucky” turns the lens inward, one specific stone, one specific set of roses, arithmetic where the debut reached for anthem.

The roses still need trimming either way.