Songfacts®:

• "Cigarette and Cocktail" puffs gently back to an era when adulthood came with an ashtray and a decent martini. The song draws on Ron Sexsmith's childhood memories of family gatherings where, as he puts it:
  
  All our fathers and our mothers
  Had a cigarette in one hand
  Cocktail in the other
  
  It's a portrait of grown-ups as children once saw them: permanently laughing, faintly smoky, and apparently indestructible.
• Rather than wagging a finger at bad habits, the song raises a glass to living fully, and perhaps a little recklessly. Sexsmith told The Sun he was thinking back to holidays at his grandparents' house, where relatives piled in and the air grew thick with smoke, laughter, and enthusiastic overindulgence.
  
  "I guess I pine for the days when people weren't so health conscious," he said. "And I still don't really engage with today's world. I just buy vinyl, and I don't have a cell phone."
• Musically, "Cigarette and Cocktail" mirrors the gentle nostalgia of the lyric. Written by Sexsmith and produced by Swede Martin Terefe (Jason Mraz, KT Tunstall), the track skips along with a whimsical arrangement of piano, violin, and cello, sounding like a slightly tipsy chamber ensemble that's wandered in from the next room.
• The song is the second track on Sexsmith's 18th album, Hangover Terrace, a title that arrived by accident. Sexsmith credits his drummer Don Kerr with the inspiration after a drive past a sign reading Hanover Terrace. Kerr misread it as Hangover Terrace.
  
  "There is a collective hangover from the last bunch of years," he told The Sun. "Since the pandemic, a kind of darkness has crept in. Some people have had a hard time and I know I've had a few fallings out. The good thing for the songwriter is that you can take the turmoil going on in your head, put it to music and feel better."