More Than I Knew

How a poet, a Beatles prompt and one throwaway remark accidentally introduced us to The Martinis.

© 2026 Good Boy Records

This is our contribution to Stories from the Jukebox, a weekly writing project where writers take a single song and use it as a spark. This week’s prompt was the song There’s a Place by The Beatles.

There is, I regret to report, no known cure for enthusiasm.

One perfectly innocent observation over morning coffee is generally sufficient to infect the entire Good Boy Records workshop. By elevenses the Boss had written a new song, invented a completely fictional British Beat Boom group, and commissioned a record sleeve for a single that, until breakfast, hadn’t existed.

This sort of thing happens rather a lot.

It all began with a writer the Boss has admired for some time.

Recently she’d wandered into poetry almost by accident and, rather wonderfully, discovered a new way of expressing herself. It wasn’t simply that readers responded to the poems. It was watching someone realise they’d found the medium they’d been looking for all along. She hadn’t suddenly become creative. She’d been creative all her life. She’d simply opened a door she’d never thought to open before.

That image refused to leave the workshop.

A little later, Mr Polk’s latest Stories from the Jukebox prompt arrived. This week’s song was There’s a Place by The Beatles.

Well.

Sometimes two completely unrelated ideas recognise each other.

The Boss already had the beginning of a song. Mr Polk had simply supplied the missing piece. Suddenly the question became wonderfully simple. What if creativity isn’t about becoming somebody else? What if it’s simply discovering that your own house has another room you’d somehow never found? Perhaps we’ve all spent years wandering through the same familiar corridors, convinced we’d seen the whole place, when all along there was another door quietly waiting for someone to try the handle.

That became the heart of More Than I Knew.

It isn’t really about the Beatles, nor is it about the prompt itself. It simply borrows the same gentle idea that somewhere, somehow, there’s a place waiting to be discovered. In this case, that place happened to be another room in an old house.

Once the lyric found its feet, the music seemed to know exactly where it belonged. It turned up dressed in the bright optimism of the British Beat Boom, sounding as though it had spent sixty years hiding in the back catalogue of a forgotten mid-sixties pop group.

Which presented an entirely different problem.

One cannot, after all, release a forgotten British Beat Boom single without first inventing a forgotten British Beat Boom band.

Thus The Martinis came into existence.

They have, I should point out, absolutely no recorded history whatsoever. Nevertheless, the Boss is now muttering darkly about the possibility that More Than I Knew may become the first single from a four-track EP. Personally, I regard this as deeply worrying. Around here these things have an unfortunate habit of beginning as “just a bit of fun” before quietly turning into fully-fledged musical projects.

I have therefore started keeping a close eye on the stationery cupboard.

More Than I Knew

© 2026 Good Boy Records

Verse 1
I knew the kitchen, knew the stairs,
The hallway with the creaking chair.
Every window faced the same old view,
I never thought there’d be something new.

Verse 2
One afternoon I tried a door
I’d never thought to open before.
The handle turned without a sound,
Like it had only just been found.

Chorus
There’s more to this old house than I knew,
More than I ever thought was true.
One small door, one different view,
There’s more to this old house than I knew.

Verse 3
The light came easy through the glass,
Like it had waited years to ask.
There wasn’t much, just space to breathe,
And walls that somehow welcomed me.

Verse 4
I still go back the way I came,
The house is standing just the same.
I simply know what I know now -
I found another room somehow.

Chorus
There’s more to this old house than I knew,
More than I ever thought was true.
One small door, one different view,
There’s more to this old house than I knew.

Final Chorus
There’s more to this old house than I knew,
More than I ever thought was true.
Every room was waiting there,
I finally found my way on through.

Whether The Martinis ever record another note remains to be seen. That was never really the point.

This little song exists because one writer unknowingly reminded another that creativity has a habit of revealing rooms we never realised were part of the house. If it encourages somebody else to try a different door, then it has already done everything we could have hoped.

Codsworth C. Gleason, Esq.
Assistant to the Boss,
Head of Everything Else,
Currently wondering: should The Martinis prove to be a one-hit wonder, we shall always treasure the memory. Should they unexpectedly release an EP... well... I did try to warn you.

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© 2026 Good Boy Records