PJ Harvey / Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea / 2000
Good Fortune
buoyant, intoxicated, slightly unstable joy
A New York love song that treats romantic euphoria as a kind of superstition-defying miracle, sung by a narrator who has ritually discarded her bad luck and now imagines running off with a new lover. It's giddy and self-aware about its own giddiness, borrowing the city's mythic geography and a little outlaw fantasy to describe falling hard and fast.
romantic euphoria reinvention/renewal New York as mythic backdrop escape and flight superstition and fate
Who's speaking
First-person narrator addressing a lover directly throughout; the voice is euphoric and unguarded, arguably unreliable in its excess, prone to grand comparisons and fantasy rather than measured description.
What happens
The song opens with a symbolic act — casting off misfortune — that doubles as a love confession. It moves through specific New York locations (Chinatown, Little Italy) that mark stages of intimacy and self-transformation, builds through a euphoric chorus of feeling remade, and ends by converting that private renewal into a shared fantasy of flight, casting the couple as outlaw-lovers on the run.
How it's built
Verse-chorus form with two verses establishing scene and intimacy, a chorus that repeats its images of transformation twice in a row before the final verse, then a coda that shifts tense from present feeling to future fantasy and closes on a chanted, almost incantatory repetition standing in for a bridge/outro.
Section by section
Opening verse
The song begins with a dramatic, almost superstitious gesture that fuses personal history with the city's vertical skyline. Discarding luck becomes a stand-in for falling in love, suggesting the narrator sees this romance as a clean break from a former self.
Second verse
The Chinatown setting, paired with a mention of time travel, suggests a conversation that felt expansive and disorienting — the hungover haze underscores that the intimacy described is heightened, maybe delirious rather than clear-eyed.
Chorus
“bird of paradise”
The chorus trades specific imagery for pure declaration of feeling, comparing the narrator to an exotic bird and a child — both images of vulnerability and wonder rather than adult caution, which is part of what makes the joy feel precarious.
Third verse
“I saw my reflection come right off your face”
This is the song's most intimate image: identity itself seems to blur between narrator and lover, as if the self is only visible through the other person's face. It marks the peak of merger before the song pivots to fantasy.
Final verse and outro
“modern day Bonnie and Clyde”
The shift from 'bad fortune' to 'good fortune' signals a reversal, but the imagined future is not domestic — it's a getaway, framed through crime and legend. The chanted closing repetition suggests both exhilaration and a loss of control, as if the couple is caught in motion they can't stop.
Craft
- extended metaphor
- Fortune, luck, and flight run through the whole song — bad fortune is thrown away, good fortune is carried, and the couple eventually become birds and fugitives, tying romantic feeling to ideas of chance and escape.
- allusion
- References to a famous outlaw couple and to gypsy imagery cast the relationship as legendary and dangerous, inflating a personal romance into pop-mythic scale.
- anaphora
- The repeated 'I feel like' construction in the chorus mimics the repetitive, almost mantra-like quality of infatuation, reinforcing the sense of a feeling being talked into being true.
- geographic imagery
- Named New York neighborhoods function less as literal setting than as emotional way-stations, each one marking a deepening of the narrator's transformation.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats the song as a portrait of infatuation so total it reorganizes the narrator's relationship to luck, identity, and the city itself — love as a kind of magical thinking. The outlaw-couple ending can be read straightforwardly as romantic escapism, but it also carries a darker undertone: Bonnie and Clyde didn't end well, and the manic repetition of the closing line could hint that this euphoria is unsustainable, a high built for a crash. Both readings coexist without canceling each other.
Context
This track appears on Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea, an album widely understood as Harvey's New York record, written and recorded during a period she spent in the city; the specific neighborhoods named throughout the album function as recurring emotional geography. I don't have reliable biographical specifics about the song's origin beyond that general context, so I'm treating it primarily as a text.
Listen for
- the shift in vocal energy between the hushed verses and the more insistent, rising chorus
- how the repeated 'I feel like' phrasing builds momentum rather than nuance
- the tonal turn from private tenderness in the third verse to public, almost cinematic fantasy in the last
- the chanted, looping outro and whether it reads as triumphant or trapped
About PJ Harvey
Polly Jean Harvey is an English singer and songwriter. Primarily known as a vocalist and guitarist, she is also proficient with a wide range of instruments.
b. 1969 / England
Full biography and catalogue