Smoke Baby

This is the eighth track on Hawksley Workman's critically acclaimed and commercially successful album, Lover/Fighter. Workman co-wrote this song with renowned producer, Doc McKinney, best recognized for his work with The Weeknd and Drake. Workman has written songs with McKinney numerous times throughout his career and "Smoke Baby" was the first one they wrote together. The song was drastically different from any that Workman had previously written. It opened his songwriting world up to a whole new process he had never explored before. "Smoke Baby" was written in a studio to a beat that McKinney created. In our interview with Workman, he explained what it was like working with him. "The beats that he would cook up always felt to me to be a little cooler," he said. "You just could always feel that Doc was onto something." It was the beginning of Workman realizing that there were other ways of writing than just sitting down at a piano like he was used to doing. This would later become a norm for Workman when he would take songwriting trips to London, England, Stockholm, Sweden, Los Angeles, and New York to work with pop producers trying to breed radio hits.

Lyrically "Smoke Baby" talks about Workman believing his own hype at the time. "I was kind of this cult star in France and I was living an excessive lifestyle," he told us. "The lyrics now serve me more as an embarrassment than they do as me proudly wearing my rock and roll badge of honor." The outlandish rock and roll lifestyle Workman mentions is evident in these lyrics: And I have never felt Quite this close to hell All this rock and roll, baby Only time will tell And specifically in the chorus, too: Smoke baby, smoke baby More alcohol, baby Cocaine in Montreal And black out on the plane, baby