Songfacts®:

• "Luck is just the intersection of hard work and opportunity - that's all luck is," American Aquarium frontman BJ Barham explained in a 2022 Songfacts Podcast interview. His dad taught him a lesson about luck early on when the young singer was bested by another boy on the baseball field and chalked it up to simple good fortune. "And my dad had to explain to me that that kid just outworked you when nobody was looking," he recalled. "That's all it was - that kid didn't get lucky."
  
  Barham had his dad's "Work Hard. Get Lucky" motto in mind when he read the news of American Aquarium's so-called overnight success when their 2012 album, Burn.Flicker.Die., unexpectedly took off. "They were like, this band came out of nowhere and I was like, we had 14 records," he lamented.
  
  He wrote "The Luckier You Get," an autobiographical song about creating luck through hard work, as a tongue-in-cheek response to outsiders dismissing all their effort as just a lucky break.
• With around 10 million streams, this is the band's most popular track on Spotify. According to Barham, its success boils down to one very relatable reason: "Because everybody hates their hometown."
  
  He continued: "I don't care if you're from Brooklyn or if you're from Reidsville, North Carolina, like I am - nobody loves where they're from. Like until later in life.
  
  I truly appreciate where I'm from now. I'm pushing 40. I'm a father. I appreciate where I'm from. I see the positives. I can finally hover above that situation and see the positive of where I was from. But from birth to 18, all I could see was the negative - all I could see was a small podunk town, backwards-thinking, holding me back. Everything was about getting out of this town. And now at 40, I find myself going back like every other week to visit my dad and eat at my favorite spot from when I was a kid. And I find these powerful images from when I was a kid that weren't bad. And so I'm not the only kid that experiences that."
• The song also evokes the bootstraps mentality of the American dream that gives people the hope they build a better life for themselves through blood, sweat, and tears (an unattainable promise for the toiling farmers on "Me + Mine").
  
  "That's why this song at its root is about working your ass off to get out of a situation that you're in, or working your way out of bad situations," said Barham. "I think that resonates because that's… another word for that is the American dream. We call that the American dream. There's a reason that kind of ethos resonates with a large chunk of our society, it's because it's what we have to live every day. It's how we all got to where we are is we weren't happy with the current situation, we made the proper changes, worked extremely hard, and got to where we are."
• The somber album takes its name from the Old Testament's Book of Lamentations, which chronicles the destruction of Jersualem in 586 BC and the despair of its people. Barham drew parallels to modern-day America. When he wrote the tracks in 2019, he had no idea how relevant the themes would be a few months later, when the coronavirus began sweeping the globe.
  
  "I wanted to write a record about the things that break us as human beings," he explained in a Rolling Stone interview. "Financial ruin, the loss of a significant other, loss of a child, addiction, vices, divorce - all of these things appear on the record. Each song represents a different way that someone can be tested in their faith. Not just in God, but faith in humanity, faith in yourself."
• Country rocker Shooter Jennings produced the album. His other production credits of 2020 include Marilyn Manson's We Are Chaos, Jaime Wyatt's Neon Cross, and The White Buffalo's On The Widow's Walk, among others.