I Need a Dollar


"I Need a Dollar" is a song performed by American singer Aloe Blacc. Blacc co-wrote the song with Leon Michels, Nick Movshon and Jeff Dynamite.
It is the intro song for the HBO show How to Make It in America, and was featured as the iTunes Single of the Week. It also featured in the game Fight Night Champion. Blacc has performed the song live on Later... with Jools Holland, The Graham Norton Show, Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, and Conan. In April 2011, it was featured in a commercial for Boost Mobile wireless services. This song also speeds up by 2bpm through it.

Music video

Two versions of the video have been released. The first, the "Las Vegas" version directed by Derek Pike, shows Blacc walking alone along a highway in Nevada, and then hitching a ride to Las Vegas, where he finds a dollar coin on the casino floor, uses it to play a slot machine, and wins.
The second, the "New York" version, features the screen being split in half. The right side shows Blacc singing inside an apartment while the left side shows a man walking through the streets of New York. Once Aloe enters the left side after the line "Maybe it's inside the bottle" and performs at a bar, the song changes to "Life So Hard".

Formats and track listings

;UK digital single
  1. "I Need a Dollar" – 4:05
  2. "I Need a Dollar" – 3:22
  3. "I Need a Dollar" – 5:48
  4. "I Need a Dollar" – 10:49
;German digital single
  1. "I Need a Dollar" – 4:02
  2. "I Need a Dollar" – 6:45
  3. "I Need a Dollar" – 3:27

    Charts

Weekly charts

Year-end charts

Certifications

Samples and covers

Various hip-hop artists have sampled "I Need a Dollar" or freestyled over the instrumental, including Yelawolf, T.I., Wax, Dumbfoundead, Chris Webby, MGK, and Mac Miller, and Sammy Adams.
Australian artist Xavier Rudd covered "I Need a Dollar" on 'Like a Version', a segment on the Australian radio station 'Triple J'
British artists Ed Solo and Deekline together remixed "I Need A Dollar" and released it as a single with the same name.
Ninja used it for his donation sound on Twitch for a while between 2011 and 2019.