This is a hauntingly beautiful song about introspection, specifically about looking back at a relationship that started bad and ended so poorly, that the narrator wants to go back to the very beginning and tell himself to not even travel down that road. I believe that the relationship started poorly because of the lines:
"Take me back to the night we met:When the night was full of terrors: And your eyes were filled with tears: When you had not touched me yet"
So, the first night was not a great start, but the narrator pursued the relationship and eventually both overcame the rough start to fall in love with each other:
"I had all and then most of you"
Like many relationships that turn sour, it was not a quick decline, but a gradual one where the narrator and their partner fall out of love and gradually grow apart
"Some and now none of you"
Losing someone who was once everything in your world, who you could confide in, tell your secrets to, share all the most intimate parts of your life, to being strangers with that person is probably one of the most painful experiences a person can go through. So Painful, the narrator wants to go back in time and tell himself to not even pursue the relationship.
This was the perfect song for "13 Reasons Why"
We're in the basement, learning to print
All of it's hot!
10, 20, 30 million ready to be spent
We're stackin' 'em against the wall
Those gangster presidents
Livin' simple and trying to get by
But honey, prices have shot through the sky
So I fixed up the basement with
What I was a-workin' with
Stocked it full of jelly jars
And heavy equipment
We're in the basement...
10, 20, 30 million dollars
Ready to be spent
Walk into the bank, try to pass that trash
Teller sees and says
All of it's hot!
10, 20, 30 million ready to be spent
We're stackin' 'em against the wall
Those gangster presidents
Livin' simple and trying to get by
But honey, prices have shot through the sky
So I fixed up the basement with
What I was a-workin' with
Stocked it full of jelly jars
And heavy equipment
We're in the basement...
10, 20, 30 million dollars
Ready to be spent
Walk into the bank, try to pass that trash
Teller sees and says
Lyrics submitted by Ice, edited by DanVitaleRocks
Legal Tender Lyrics as written by Catherine Elizabeth Pierson Robert Waldrop
Lyrics © Sentric Music, Kobalt Music Publishing Ltd.
Lyrics powered by LyricFind
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Just a nice little song about counterfeiting money... Actually I think it's a very well constructed song when, combined with the synth is a great example of '80s music. Great song!
i don't get it...a song about counterfeiting money!!! yah!
well good song anyways..
Although @ the end "all conterfiet" sounds like "on Cannabis" ....wait up grass=cannabis....nah
This song is inspired not so much by actual counterfeiters, as by movies about them—and, I think, especially the Burt Lancaster comedy "Mister 880", based on the real-life case of Edward Mueller.
Mueller didn't counterfeit millions of dollars, and he didn't get caught trying to pass bills to a bank and take off in a Jeep—but everything else fits. He was "living simple, and trying to get by", and failing. As a junk collector, he'd accumulated some old but professional printing equipment, which he installed in the basement, and used to start printing money. He stored his ink in jelly jars. He began printing just a few dollars at a time to pay his expenses, making sure never to pass bills at the same shop twice. His counterfeiting was terrible (he didn't even spell "Washington" right), and at one point in either the Burt Lancaster movie or the other movie based on Mueller but gender-swapped that I forget the name of, one of the shopkeepers calls it trash and compares it to grass. He got away with it for years just because a guy passing $1 at one shop at $2 at another shop a week later just isn't the Secret Service's top priority.
Also, I love the line "those gangster presidents". It just doesn't have the same connotations post-Ice Cube as it did in 1983, when "dead presidents" was still ironic retro-1940s slang used by investment-banker yuppies.