Jealous of Your Cigarette

Album: (Last Night We Were) The Delicious Wolves (2001)
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Songfacts®:

  • "Jealous of Your Cigarette" is the second track on Hawksley Workman's second album, (Last Night We Were) The Delicious Wolves. The song showcases Workman's clever, witty, and sometimes hilarious lyrics. Workman revealed in our interview that his lyrics are often humorous because he loved comedy so much when he was a kid. Admiring comedians like David Letterman, Jerry Seinfeld, Kids in the Hall, and Gary Larsen had an influence on his writing.

    "These were people who were able to shine the light on absurdity, which for me life feels so much more absurd than it does feel practical. So I was always consumed by comedy for that reason," Workman explained.

    An example of some of Workman's absurd lyrics can be found in the chorus of this track:

    I'm jealous of your cigarette
    And all the things you do with it
    I'm jealous of your cigarette
    And how you wanna suck on it
    And not me
  • Workman wrote this song on a piano. He improvised the intro while tracking the bed track of the piano. Workman explained the process to us. "The intro you hear is being created as you hear it," he said, adding that he probably improvised the bridge while he was recording it as well. "Back in those days when I was writing a little bit more traditionally at a piano, I couldn't oftentimes just be arsed to write a bridge so I would just write it as I was tracking the bed tracks."
  • "Jealous of Your Cigarette" was the second single from (Last Night We Were) The Delicious Wolves. The music video garnered a lot of buzz when it was released because of the way it was shot in one complete sequence. It won Best Video at the JUNO Awards in 2002.

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