Busted Debtors' Prison Lampshade On Dustbowl Revival

Busted Album: The Dustbowl Revival (2016)
Debtors' Prison Album: The Dustbowl Revival (2017)
Lampshade On Album: With A Lampshade On (2015)
by Dustbowl Revival

Ray Charles was busted because he was broke; the guy in this song is busted because he's been caught cheating, and his girl is calling him out:

You think you got something
But you don't got nothing
Honey if you don't got me

Zach Lupetin, one of eight members of the band, writes most of their lyrics, including this one. Their female vocalist Liz Beebe takes the lead on the track, so the gender is switched, but the events are grounded in truth. "I like to joke now (though it didn't seem funny at all at the time) that having your heart broken and being cheated on is the best thing that can ever happen to a songwriter," Lupetin told Songfacts. "We don't forget things easily - so in the sense that the person you love and have been giving second chances to has been sneaking around on you all along - that's definitely something that happened to me when I first moved out to California, and I tried to translate it to the woman's perspective."

Devin Schiro directed the video, which shows a guy (Bryce Rankins) looking on as three different girls (Erica Lawless, Kaitlyn Schwalbe-Fletcher, Taylor Leigh Edwards) each do an interpretive dance to taunt him. He won't make that mistake again.

"If I was a betting man, I wouldn't bet on me," Dustbowl Revival singers Zach Lupetin and Liz Beebe sing on this woebegone track about a destitue couple who fall in love and have twins in Debtors' Prison. Despite their economic doom, they know they will always have their freedom. It's definitely the most emotional song for me and Liz to sing," Lupetin said in a Songfacts interview. "It's kind of a folk song in the style of Springsteen's "The River" which I grew up singing with my dad. A young couple who is sort of falling through the cracks of society - but they're still proud that they aren't giving up and their love endures it all."

If there's a lampshade on your head, you've already made some bad decisions and are likely to make more, but have a good time doing it. In Lampshade On, written and sung by group leader Zach Lupetin, he steals a car, shoots out some tires, rescues his girl from a burning building, and becomes governor of Tennessee... all with a lampshade on. Lupetin says the song is about "letting loose and forgetting the bulls--t of life."

The song began as a joke, modeled on the Beatles song "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da."

Directed by Kyle Newacheck, the video takes place at a house party in Los Angeles thrown for the shoot. The revelers are mostly fans of the band who were invited, along with "a few random dudes off the street."