Songwriting workshops have a way of concentrating creative energy and nudging ideas toward completion, which is often the hardest part of the writing process.
The 2016 Songwriters Association of Canada (SAC) Challenge was an important experience for me. It gave me focus and follow-through, resulting in a number of songs that I’ve since recorded. ‘Wear Anything!‘ (aka, the hat song) from Seeing the Sun Again emerged from that workshop. So did two tracks from Hired Gun—‘Good Man Down’ and the focus of this post, ‘Can’t Take It Back.’
I wrote about it at the time, including a nice comment on the song from The Northern Pikes’ Bryan Potvin:
Selkirk Range’s “Can’t Take It Back” is killer country music. Country has always been a genre that relies on ‘the story’. This tune totally delivers, complete with a gorgeous melody and heartfelt performance.
The song owes as much to the SAC session as it does to a songwriting course I’d taken with Pat Pattison at Berklee College of Music. For anyone who hasn’t crossed paths with him, Pattison is something of a legend—one of Berklee’s most respected instructors and the person who helped shape the lyric craft of artists like John Mayer and Gillian Welch.
Berklee is a terrific resource for musicians looking to sharpen their craft, but Pattison’s influence in particular stuck with me. He made a simple but profound point: a song shouldn’t fight with itself. The story, the mood, the language, the melody, the rhythm—they all need to pull in the same emotional direction.
This is sometimes known as prosody—the principle that every word, every musical choice, and the structure itself must work together so the song’s meaning and its musical elements are completely aligned.
‘Can’t Take It Back’ is built on that principle.
The theme naturally lends itself to a kind of emotional time travel: doing something in a relationship you can’t undo—one of those moments that hits so hard you wish you could rewind the world by five minutes, or even five seconds.
To capture that feeling, the song opens at the flash point—an irrevocable act—and then works backward. Each verse rewinds from present to past, exposing bad choices and the betrayal of something sacred.
Each of the verses conveys a set of images as we venture back in time with the character:
- Verse 1, minutes before – The “lines of force” in a cracked mirror. Damage done and only himself to blame.
- Verse 2, hours before – Bolting out the front door mid-argument, knowing nothing good will follow.
- Verse 3, years before – A lover’s note tucked into a coat pocket. A tiny time capsule from a cherished moment. And the stark admission that he had “burned it to ash” through bad decisions.
And while the storyline is fictional, the core feeling is familiar to almost everyone. We’ve all had that moment—big or small—when we said or did something we wish we could take back. When the words escaped before we could reel them in. When a rash decision set something in motion we couldn’t stop. That universality is meant to be the song’s anchor.
It’s a song about tragic mistakes, yes. But it’s also about the humanity in the hurting.
SELKIRK RANGE 
