Little Legend lead singer and songwriter Brandy John Tudor seems infatuated with the traps that were never meant to be seen as traps. They are the snares that were never laid out. They grew wild, like a Canadian thistle popping out of what used to be a nice patch of lawn - the kind of weed that you can never get by the roots, the kind that you can pull or poison and it will resiliently find a way to regenerate and ugly things up another time. Tudor's characters sound as if they're all coming from places that lacking confidence. They are the places that all high school seniors state that they're never going to return to after graduation, besides the once or twice annually to visit their parents - probably around the holidays or a wedding. They are places that have a diner that's always filled with gossip and only one place where liquor can be purchased and even then, it had better be done before 10 pm or you're shit out of luck. These are the places that you get the hell out of, if you knew what was good for you as a young person, but before long begin to miss for their simplicity - the very thing that you can't find any trace of in your current, daily life.
Tudor doesn't necessarily sing about these cities, but they are what made the people that are still hanging around them in his songs. These are people who are deeper than they'd ever admit. They have their hands dirty every day and they've loved or been loved enough to know that there's nothing better/worse in the world that can happen to a man. These are the kinds of people who are starting to take inventory of what all they've done and what all they can claim as their own. Mostly, they've got wrinkles and scars. Some days they've got all the confidence they could ever want and others, they're in emotional shambles.
The Madison, Wisconsin, band details the heartaches, the dual feeling of living and dying and making the best out of living in an ignorable small town that must be somewhere other than Madison. They sing about people who have nothing to lose, so they drive fast cars, with "one foot on the gas, one foot on the grave." They sing about going out at night and trying to shake some life into themselves, even while still talking about getting out of there - just leaving everything behind. They don't probably because there's no getting away from places like those. Tudor sings, "For heaven sakes/I work like hell/If I've been rewarded/There's no way to tell/Oh, when will I be complete/When will I be released," summing up what that man does and what he hopes for.