THE DOLLAR MENU: TRACK BY TRACK Original version February 2025 Updated version containing better explanations and blah blah Summer 2026 1. Layla's Boyfriend This is me making up a story. Basic pop tunes for the masses. Big whoop. I had some trouble writing it seeing as every female name I thought of, I was somehow related to. I got a big family. If there's a Layla I don't know about, I apologize. About Mr. Chow, I didn't even know what that place was until I googled "expensive restaurants" and found one that fit the rhyme scheme. Whaddya know, it ended up becoming my favorite line in the entire song. 2. (You're So) Artificial This is a song written by the great Phillip Bimstein of Phil 'N The Blanks, one of the early new wave bands to get some traction on MTV with songs like PRL-8-53. The way I found out about this was my mentor (we'll talk about him later) forwarded me a song from one of his personal friends, and that happened to be Bimstein. The way it was, it was a song written for a (ultimately scrapped) Blanks reunion (I think, I could be misremembering it). So I get the voice memo, chord sheet, and the lyrics. I decide to record my own little version. Here is the post that Mr. Bimstein put out the next day on his Facebook page. Just yesterday I shared with an old dear friend (Otis Ball) a very primitive recording I made of a punkish song I wrote this year for my university students (who I try to steer away from using AI on their papers 😉.) He sent it to a kid he works with and lo and behold overnight the brilliant kid (Rhett Holland) goes and makes his own quick and spontaneous recording of it (much better than mine)! Here it is, a double entendre addressed to either an AI, a partner, or both: "(You're So) Artificial" About a year later, I now heavily stand against generative AI, so I guess Mr. Bimstein predicted my eventual thoughts on the technology. Good on you, Bimstein! 3. Pictures Of You I made this one up too. This was originally a completely different song if you can believe it. Used to be an I-miss-you song, where the chorus was "Lookin at pictures of you, makes me think why I left you so soon" which is a bit of a shocker seeing as the final draft is very bitter and a little.. angry? But not in a good way. Kinda like you're pouting because your mom won't let you wear shirts with skulls on them. That's what I get from this song nowadays. Emo breakup song. 4. Coward's In Love This is a song I wrote in my freshman year. This song peaked on Strikes Again. Where was I? Oh yeah. Freshman year. I had a crush on this girl who went on to be kind of crazy. I'm kinda glad I got rejected on that. The song proved to be much better than the end goal. But we had 4th block theatre together, and I wrote a painfuly obvious song about her that I (for whatever reason) released as-is. With some reworking, it became just ambiguous enough that it can be about anyone. Anyways, time went by, she graduated, and I think she blocked me. Which doesn't really make sense, considering we didn't really hate each other. We still said hi to each other in the halls. I swear, people turn 18 and act like their younger friends are still crapping their pants in diapers. That's my working theory. 5. The Interview (Goofin' On The Job) Mikah. Mikah, Mikah, Mikah. He was my drummer for a good long while. I have a few videos of us just bangin away on our instruments playing Weezer in the seventh grade. But we also had a short lived internet show called the Rhett and Mikah Show, and this was one of the cut segments. This was shot I believe on the first day of our freshman year. It's a dumb little sketch, but that was our style. We did dumb things for no other reason to make us laugh. 6. Paralyzed Back to 7th grade, I had a crush on this girl who would NOT kill me anymore if I said her name! But I'm still not going to, out of privacy. But anyways, I asked her out, and she rejected me, and I got sad. I wrote a lot too. She got really hostile towards me for a while afterwards, and when we went into high school she moved to Florida. Flash forward about.. god, 3 years later. She comments on a community post I did on my YouTube channel, something along the lines of "did you actually write a song about me in like 8th grade i'm sorry" and I respond "If this is who I think this is, contact me immediately". So we start chatting on Whatsapp, and the first thing I do is apologize for my weird behavior in 7th grade and how I regret every bit of my middle school career. But other than that, our reconnection goes well, and I would even go as far to say we're friends again. 7. Dear God, I Hope You Feel The Same I don't have much to say about this one, aside from the fact it's my least favorite tune on the album, despite the fact I played it live at my second show. I like Mike Nesmith, can you tell? 8. It's Not The Same In the far off year of 2017, in a Leland suburb, the most influential band of all time was born. Bloody World, a rock n' roll group comprised of two step brothers, Rhett Holland on drums and vocals, and Mason Mims on detuned guitar and vocals. Together, Bloody World would tour the land, making the world bloodier with every step. Not just because of their name, the notorious moshpits would easily cause 2 or 3 fatalities per show. Mason was once quoted when confronted about the deaths saying "Survival of the fittest", while Rhett polished off a bottle of whiskey and threw it at the interviewer. For their brief time together, they influenced several acts such as the Beatles, Brian Wilson, Elvis Presley, and Jay-Z. Their on stage antics such as Rhett's habit of screaming and jumping off his drum amp sold out arenas all over the globe, as well as Mason taking a prop gun and shooting his stepbrother at the end of each show. But behind the scenes, the band was anything but functional. Rhett became growingly more reliant on drugs to keep him sane, as Mason constantly brought his East Asian conceptual artist girlfriend to every studio session. The band fizzled out in 2018. Everything came to a close when Rhett Holland was found dead in his Los Angeles apartment, surrounded by cocaine, empty bottles (both of the pill and alcohol variety), used syringes, and about any drug you could think of. Seeing no reason to continue the band, Mason quickly sprouted off into a solo project. The Plastic Mims Band was an improvisational melodica jazz funk fusion group that only lasted 2 weeks. Its members included Mason Mims, his girlfriend Yono Oko, and Terence Trent D'Arby. After the band broke up, Rhett Holland went into a studio to record a solo album that would ultimately release after his death as "The Dollar Menu" in February of 2025. The album contained 11 songs, one being the Bloody World smash hit "It's Not The Same" with updated lyrics and chords. 9. Another Kind Of Crazy This is about a multitude of people. I can't exactly remember who, but I know that two of them were in other songs. This is mainly a song about people I got too attached too, and then walked out on me. It's whatever, but the real meat and potatoes is the fact that this is the only song in my repertoire that is actually double-award winning (The Minnie in Outstanding Sound Design, NCTC Excellence in Sound Design and Original Music) so that's pretty swell. 10. Layla's Boyfriend (Reprise) I've always been a sucker for things going full circle, so I figured I'd haphazardly regurgitate some lines from the first song on the record "Layla's Boyfriend". Other Songs That Didn't Make The Cut: I Remember Cindy A while ago, a friend of mine totally walked out on our group. Then she came back. Then she left again. Then she came back. Then she left for good. This is a song about that. From a conversation with my mentor Otis Ball (I told you we'd talk about him!) he told me the best way to write a song about someone without being ambiguous or name dropping is to just change the name. So that's what I did. Effyousong This is a song that went through a couple iterations. Otis told me that a good old "f*ck-you" song will always drive an album home, so I came up with a few different drafts, and none of them made the cut for the album. Dissonant There is an unlisted upload of this simple acoustic song on my YouTube and every once in a while I'll relisten to it and not really like it all that much. The Art Of Playing The Game (You Shouldn't Stay) Another Mike Nesmith styled song, lovingly borrows some of the lyrics from Nine Times Blue. Has a decent chorus, verses are soso.