Spend My Money

This alt-rock track dates back to the earliest iteration of The Heavy Hours, when guitarist AJ Yorio was the band's lead singer. Because there was only a skeleton of an idea, Yorio would mumble his way through the tune on stage but managed to come up with the phrase "spend my money," which sparked future frontman Michael Marcagi's imagination. Yorio told the Songfacts Podcast in 2022, "It was super weird - I remember I sang 'spend my money' as the chorus for no particular reason, and then Michael came up with these pretty beautiful lyrics that retained 'spend my money.' Lyrically, it's kind of the softer parallel to 'Wasting All Our Time.'" Marcagi added: "I don't even remember it that well, but I do remember it as being along the same lines as 'Wasting All Our Time.' Maybe we were going through more than we realized, but I think we were just going through a phase of your mid-20s when you're trying to figure out what you want to be and what you want to do with your life. We were kind of in this middle ground of having friends that are going off and getting really good jobs and starting to settle down as people. Everyone's changing in their mid-20s, and we felt this pull of, 'Do we give this dream up and settle into normal society or do we stick to our guns and this is what we want to do?' We were going through some deep, theological issues."

After his bandmates confronted him with the hard truth about his vocal abilities, Yorio agreed it was the best move to pass the mic to Mike. He said, "Jon and Mike sort of told me, 'Hey asshole, you can't sing. Michael sings a lot better, let's take your ego off.'"

When the band finally scraped together enough money for some studio time, they headed to Richmond, Virginia, to record a handful of songs during a nine-day stretch. Those tracks ended up in the hands of Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys, who ended up co-writing their single "Don't Walk Away," from their 2021 Wildfire EP. But for their next release, Gardens, they decided to revisit the songs they recorded years earlier, one of which was "Spend My Money."