I bought Seanan McGuire’s album Wicked Girls recently, without having listened to much of it. But I really like her books (she writes urban fantasy as Seanan McGuire, and zombie political thrillers as Mira Grant), and she’s a fantastic lyricist, so I figured I’d enjoy the album. And I do – it’s great modern folk music.

One of my favourite songs on the album is Wicked Girls Saving Ourselves – Theodora Goss wrote a fantastic post about this song, with a link to a video of a live performance. Her favourite verse is also mine – the one about Susan and Lucy from the Narnia books – because I love this proud version of Susan:

“Susan and Lucy were queens, and they ruled well and proudly.
They honored their land and their lord, rang the bells long and loudly.
They never once asked to return to their lives
To be children and chattel and mothers and wives,
But the land cast them out in a lesson that only one learned;
And one queen said ‘I am not a toy’, and she never returned.”

I really wanted to figure out the chords because at the moment I’m going through a phase of wanting to be able to play every song I love on the ukulele. The husband tends to point out in a slightly exasperated fashion that songs played on piano, for example, do not perhaps sound their best on ukulele, but I charge on heedless of his sensible advice, and teach myself to play songs like Jealous Guy (which really does sound better on a piano, and yet there’s something about those chord changes on ukulele that I like).

Anyway, I am not sufficiently musically talented to work out chords by listening to music – I can plunk out the melody, but moving to chords from there is a bit beyond me. So I made the husband listen to Wicked Girls repeatedly with me next to the keyboard, and we eventually put it together, providing me with yet another opportunity for me to butcher a perfectly lovely song on ukulele. Unfortunately it is in B minor, which is not my favourite chord, but I suppose this provides me with an opportunity to work on it.

(If you happen to be wanting to play Wicked Girls Saving Themselves, you can download this PDF of the chords – Wicked Girls Saving Themselves by Seanan McGuire – chords. And were you wanting some extra verses? Because Seanan wrote some and posted them here and here.).