Dollar Signs released their new album Legend Tripping last week, and it’s a raw, catchy, emotional punk album with everything from Thin Lizzy solos to ska parts–fans of Jeff Rosenstock and Titus Andronicus should take note. You can read more about it in Notable Releases, and for a much deeper dive into the album, singer/songwriter Erik Button has given us a track-by-track breakdown. Read on for what he had to say, and pick up a vinyl copy of the album from Self Aware Records.
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DOLLAR SIGNS’ TRACK-BY-TRACK BREAKDOWN OF LEGEND TRIPPING
“Can’t Go Home Again”
This song, and you’ll see a pattern here, came together very slowly and then all at once. Once I had landed on this overarching idea of a hometown record and coming back to it, I knew I wanted the first song to take place in the car driving into the place I grew up in. The highway cuts right through the center of my town and is usually jam packed with people trying to go as fast as humanly possible to get to their commuter jobs, or Biscuitville, or the outlet mall. Making the drive at night is a totally different experience. I was really thinking about one night in particular years ago after a house show. The lights are busted and the road is only dotted with occasional billboards for the pride of our hometown, the discount cigarette emporium known as JR’s, and other signs for an assortment of injury lawyers, salvation huts and strip clubs. At the time I didn’t know why I had to go home but I knew I had to. I had no objective in particular, it was just something inside me. Of course I couldn’t go to my parents, or grandparents or friends because then I would look crazy. This was something of a pattern. The first time it happened was when I was 17 and watched The Departed. I drove to the Virginia border at 2:00 AM. Something about driving has always been a way I cleared my head and setting some kind of destination was a way to set some kind of end point to whatever episode I’m having. Of course on all these late night drives I would either blast whatever albums I was obsessed with at the time or I would listen to Coast to Coast with Art Bell. Those weird stories about alien abduction, time slips and Mel’s Hole kept me company in some of the strangest times of my life.
Anyway, this song set in motion the main theme of the record which is, well, you can’t go home again. Even if you can physically go back to a place, that place may have changed or if it hasn’t you may not be able to reconcile your memory of that place with its reality. Which nightmare is it? You decide!
The original demo for this song was written while the band was trapped in Wyoming with Covid. I somehow didn’t get it so if I wasn’t working or being the band’s sexy, sexy nurse I was working on this song and from the moment I wrote it I knew if it would be the first song on the record. I love the momentum of one chord songs and this thing feels very rock n roll to me. Also glad I got to use the verb “chitter” which is used a lot in one of the bleakest stories ever, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.
“Bless Your Heart”
“Bless Your Heart” wasn’t the first song written for the record but it definitely was the song that solidified the vibe of what Legend Tripping would be. This song really showed us that we could pull off doing a big ass rock-n-roll guitar record. The song is about the ways we try to fill that big ol’ hole in ourselves and how a lot of people think they have the answer of how to cement that fucker closed but I’m not sure there is a simple solution to it. Healing is hard, nonlinear and painful but worthwhile. It’s a messy business but hopefully a harmonized guitar solo can mend at least the corners of your heart. This song was a rare instance of having an idea for a song and the end piece is pretty similar to the original demo. What this song is for me is how we filter the advice we’re given and how you feel terrible when someone gives you simple advice. Like, it can’t be that easy right? I’ve also had a number of people in my life recommend me to try microdosing and if that works for you, cool, but mildly tripping balls seems like maybe not the healthiest way to swallow reality. I don’t know. And then on the other hand, the way you self soothe with alcohol, metaphysics or even art also doesn’t quite seem right to fill whatever hole inside of you. Sometimes, you just gotta scream.
The opening lines of the song is a reference to the recurring theme of my young life of doing things that weren’t illegal or wrong in any way but certainly were suspicious. I wasn’t partying or doing drugs, I drove the speed limit. I never really did anything out of bounds besides trespass, like, a lot and be really into the devil’s music. I was a weird kid who turned into a strange teenager and an even odder adult. Sorry about that mom!
Folklore time! I reference Zener Cards which are the cards designed by J.B. Rhine at the Duke Parapsychology Lab that detects psychic abilities. They are the cards Bill Murray uses at the beginning of Ghostbusters. He’s also the one that gave me the quote “We don’t know what we are” which fit nicely with the theme of the song. Did you know that the field of parapsychology was founded when J.B. Rhine was convinced that a horse called Ladywonder could read the future? Well, I learned it and so now I guess you should know it too.
“Old Times Sake”
“Old Time’s Sake” was the second to last song written for the record but it has song lyrics from some of the earliest stuff written for what would be Legend Tripping. After I figured out the rough idea of this record I got to writing but because this is stylistically pretty different from our previous stuff it took some time finding the right tone. I didn’t want the horror elements to take a total backseat to our typical style but I also didn’t want this record to feel like I was trying to give a history lesson or something. This song in particular was difficult because it’s a positive song which has always been a challenge for me. Happy songs are difficult because it’s hard for them to ring true and not feel corny. So this song sat on the shelf for a long time. We were working on the songs as a full band in the mountains of North Carolina and I woke up one morning with a very clear idea finally.
On our first record we have a song called Brutal Dan and I was thinking about the guy I wrote that song about. He was a huge metal head who was my neighbor in college and would invite me over, give me Guiness, show me black metal bands and try to teach me how to do pig squeals. I wrote the song but haven’t talked to him in 10 years, sadly. Fast forward to now. We were getting our dog trained and it turned out our dog trainer was engaged to “Brutal Dan’s” brother. I asked her how “Dan” was doing and she said “Oh you know, still screaming.” I woke up that morning thinking about that and how beautiful it is to change but how there’s also a power in sticking to your guns and knowing what you want and being happy with your station in life. So, with him in mind the rest of the song came out quickly. I even got to add a call back which might be cheesy but whatever.
Oh yeah, folklore! The Devil’s Tramping Ground is a clearing in the woods in Chatham County that supposedly nothing will grow in, animals will avoid and anything placed in the circle will be moved out of it by dawn. As the story goes it’s where the devil walks in a circle all night coming up with new ways to torment humanity like NFT’s, lactose intolerance and money. If you go there it is definitely a dirt patch in the woods but it’s mostly just filled with Miller Lite cans and condom boxes. Less the ephemera of the lord of darkness and more the unholy workings of bored teens.
“Fight Or Flight”
Oh wow, it’s a real punk song! Probably the most directly political song we’ve ever made, in our own way. This song is the opposite of the last song. This is about your friend from your highschool who stayed in your hometown and slowly became poisoned by it. It can happen to anyone and we wanted to show how easy it is to become radicalized if the circumstances are just so. The bridge was written by Dylan about a childhood friend they had who became an alt-right weirdo and wanted to be a survivalist. He didn’t make it because, as it turns out, surviving off the land is hard and also sucks. The chorus of the song is about which battles to fight. When I go to my hometown there’s a weird thing where people will say the craziest shit to me because they assume anyone in that space is aligned with them. The most exhausting part of going home is constantly having to challenge people’s ideals in a way that isn’t just character assassination. Afterall, what I want is to change people’s minds and what we’re actually fighting is a multibillion dollar propaganda machine that is turned up to 11. I just have to believe that if I, a stubborn idiot, can change my mind and ideals than anyone can truly.
Political songs are very difficult to pull off and I’ve always felt like the best approach is to make it personal. It makes the song feel less like propaganda or preachy. I want to always make it feel like I’m talking about the reality of a situation instead of the slogan-y stuff. I hope I did OK and want to do this more in the future so hopefully I can hone in my style a little better.
Anywho, this song references The Thing and Scream back to back and Luke’s horn line absolutely rips. so even if you hate politics in music you can enjoy that, I guess.
“Resonator!”
Ok! This is the first song written for Legend Tripping and one of the rare instances of me staying more on the metaphorical side of songwriting but I think it works. As I mentioned before, the first crop of songs I wrote didn’t feel quite right until this song fell out of me. The original batch of songs felt too on the nose or cheesy or too abstract. Resonator feels like I found some kind of balance between the reality of what I’m trying to convey and the imagery I wanted to use. This song is about how resistant to change I am and how painful change can be. We’re told that change makes you feel great but that has never been the case for me. So I wanted this song to communicate that feeling of not wanting to do the work on yourself because your gut is saying “don’t go down in the basement of your heart, it’s scary”. There’s this voice in my head constantly trying to make excuses to not be better and how that can feel like people in a movie theater taunting the teenagers on screen to do the obvious and rational thing. It seems so easy when you’re even one degree removed. That’s probably why I’m pretty good at giving advice and stunningly bad at following it.
Outside of Bloody Mary there’s not really any folklore in this song because I was really digging into the horror film tropes so I’ll just say probably the most strange lyric of the album is on this song “Years of damage congealed into a monster mash/If I open it up can I put it back?” If you enjoy that line then I think the rest of the album will work for you.
“East of the Rockies”
So even though this is our spooky halloween record almost all the songs on Legend Tripping are these huge loud anthems. So to break it up we wanted to include at least one dark sounding song and I think all our brains immediately went to that dark 2nd wave ska sound like “Ghost Town” or “The Guns of Brixton.“ I played around with some vocal melodies and lyrics but it just didn’t feel quite right. Ultimately I’m really happy with this as an instrumental with the interviews on it. My regular job is editing documentaries so it was cool to apply some of those skills to the album. When we gave it to our post mixer, Rick Johnson he was just like “do you want me to dub the shit out of this” and of course we agreed and I think it led to one of the most unique moments on the record. SKA BABY.
“Legend Tripping”
“Legend Tripping” is the title track off our new record called Legend Tripping. Approaching a record about living and growing up in the south can be tricky. I really wanted to get into the highs and lows of this and this song was important to me because many people like to look at this area of the country and just point at it and say “bad”. The south is not a monolith. The systemic problems of the south are the same problems in every state in the country. There’s plenty of people here that fight against it and know better. So I wrote this song for punks with southern accents and specifically how strange and wonderful it is that outsiders tend to gravitate towards each other. Of course this song was a challenge for me to write because writing joyful music is extremely difficult for me but you know, sometimes you gotta represent. Mostly I want to thank all the DIY show bookers who are usually just young excited kids with access to a space and a PA system that pull together shows and build little scenes in whatever space they can duct tape together. Shout out to Rock Hill South Carolina, Greensboro North Carolina (where I first started going to shows), Huntington West Virginia and Lexington Kentucky as the gold standard for having great scenes in places band bookers call “C” markets.
I had a pile of stories to pull from when writing this album that were examples of things from my past that seemed completely normal until I grew up and realized just how surreal growing up in a smaller town can be. Things like getting a gun for your 12th birthday, the baptist church that ran a haunted house every October in the old meat packing plant, knowing more than one person that lost fingers to Unregulated South Carolinian fireworks, etc. etc. etc. At the top of the list was the fact that when I was 7 years old one of our school field trips was to a factory that produced cigarettes. This is a memory so strange that I thought for sure I made it up since it also happens in an old episode of South Park but after reaching it turns out that until 1998 schools in my part of the state did field trips there so I wasn’t crazy after all.
“C.V.S.M.”
I reference a good variety of made up bullshit on this new record but the Cameron Village Slime Mold is 100% real. Is it a worm colony? A trick of the light? I don’t know, but it’s fucking weird, man. Check it out:
This song was written about the frustration I had with myself for not losing more weight in the lead up to my wedding. Luke and I were on the road for work and the company we work for had rented our band van so we were basically on tour except not playing music. It felt weird. So on nights I had the energy I would build a makeshift soundproof box out of whatever cushions were in my hotel room and tinker with this song. The reason it feels so frantic is because I was very stressed at the time and I feel like that runs through the songs. I gave Luke that nice quiet part in the middle because while I was losing my mind he was always forcing me to pause and relax so it just felt right to give him that moment. Also, I’ve been writing self deprecating songs for so long I wanted to turn it on its head and have the ending feel triumphant. I think it’s kinda self indulgent and easy to constantly shit talk yourself so if I allow myself to do it I want to always undercut it in some way.
A lot of the best moments of the song were hashed out later with the full band. This song is musically the most ambitious on the album and when we started working on this song we almost gave up a handful of times on it because it’s all syncopated and gigantic and a little out of our comfort zone but I’m really glad we stuck with it. Sometimes you gotta push yourself and try new shit and have Rick add theremin on parts of it. The earth is dying, wages are stagnating, house costs are impossible, just add the fucking baritone sax on end for God’s sake.
“Patterson-Gimlin”
“Patterson-Gimlin” was the last song written for the record and was kind of a last minute addition (at the last practice everyone in the band said they forgot how to play it). We had 10 songs written but I felt like there was still something missing from the album. I felt like I hadn’t concretely put together the horror imagery with the core themes of returning home so I wrote this song as a way to lay all my cards on the table. This record is full of characters and I wanted to give little glimpses of the lives of people who got trapped in my hometown. I was specifically thinking about one of the two bars there that I everytime I end up in one of them I inevitably run into someone who I hoped I’d never see again.
The end of the song is referencing the over-analysis of things like the Patterson-Gimlin tape of Bigfoot fame (you know the one) or the Zeputer film of the JFK assassination. Like every frame of these things have been examined, pulled apart, and blown up and this hasn’t made the film gain any clarity. It’s turned them both into essentially abstract paintings. It’s the same way I felt writing this record and going back through my memory. Learning more facts about my life didn’t make it more clear, it just wedged my memory and reality almost completely in half.
As soon as the ink was down on this song I heard our good friend Alexa Jenson’s voice on it and I’m so glad she came up to the mountains to sing on it and other songs. It will also never not be funny getting someone as talented as her to sing things like “another year on Mr. Bone’s Wild Ride.”
“Nuclear Family”
“Nuclear Family” was a song written pretty early in the process but I was really nervous to share it with the band because, obviously, this might be the most out there idea on the record. After learning about the US government accidentally dropping two atomic bombs on the low country of North Carolina I’ve never really been able to get that story out of my brain. It happened because during the cold war any plan that would hold nuclear munitions in war time would also train with them loaded up. Then a bit of a whoopsie-doodle happened and two of the bombs dropped right outside of Goldsboro. At the time a big whig for the army said there was no danger but on his deathbed he confessed that if one basic safety pin had failed North Carolina would’ve turned into a bay. One of the bombs is still out there. The government bought a small plot of land around the bomb but it sits there even today.
It took me a long time to figure out an angle to approach that story and how to put it in a song. I then started remembering some stories from my early college years and this song just fell out of me afterward. This song fully embraces the pop punk idea of “I gotta get out of my hometown” in a way that hopefully feels a bit less cliche. The older you get the harder it is to change the course of your life and leaving is sometimes an act of real bravery. It was a fun exercise trying to fit in as much nuclear imagery as I could but nothing in the song beats Tommy’s guitar work. This is a guitar record and nothing shows that off better than here.
“Eastover”
Luke wrote this song but I’ll do my best! This record is largely about characters. People who left and came back, people who stayed but never let home change them, people who got their brains melted by their hometown, people who finally got out and this song is about our friends who never had a chance to leave. I cried very hard the first time I heard it and we tried making this song full band for months. It went through probably 4 different versions but at the end none of them really felt as good or as impactful as that original demo. When it came time to record Luke recorded every instrument for this song and I just tried my best to do the song justice. For such a loud, huge record it felt right to end it like this. “Nuclear Family” feels like a climax to a movie and this is the camera wandering off, zooming out and out, before fading to credits.