Songfacts®:

• "Last Dance With Mary Jane" is Snoop Dogg's reworking of the 1993 Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers classic "Mary Jane's Last Dance." Petty's song can be interpreted to be about smoking marijuana ("mary jane") if you stretch your imagination, but Snoop's version certainly is. Like Rick James did on his 1978 song "Mary Jane," Snoop turns weed into a lady, the love of his life. He recounts his ups and down with Mary, starting when he took his first puff at age 5(!).
  
  Snoop's version samples the chorus from Petty's song along with various other elements throughout, but with very different verses.
• The video opens with a vignette where Dr. Dre, who produced the song, plays a medical doctor telling Snoop that pot has wrecked his lungs and if he doesn't quit, he'll die. The song then becomes him reckoning with the decision, deciding in the end that he can't give it up.
  
  Snoop has quit weed before but has always returns to it. A quote he's fond of when someone asks him why he wasn't able to kick the habit: "It kicked me back."
• Jelly Roll takes the second verse, offering his take on marijuana: "Sometimes you gotta roll with it."
  
  He's talked about how smoking pot keeps him from craving hard drugs like cocaine or prescription meds that could get him hooked. It keeps him sober.
• Snoop and Jelly Roll performed the song live for the first time on November 26, 2024 at Jelly Roll's show in Nashville. The song was then released on Snoop's album Missionary on December 13, 2024. (Snoop's 1993 album is called Doggystyle, so you can probably suss out his position on Missionary.)
• Jelly Roll started off as a rapper and listened to a lot of Snoop Dogg when he was younger. "It's unreal" he said about getting to work with him.
• Like the Pink Floyd movie The Wall, the music video for "Last Dance With Mary Jane" is best viewed after a few tokes. Directed by Dave Meyers, it's crazy psychedelic, with animated versions of pot stars Bob Marley, Redman, Method Man, B-Real (of Cypress Hill) and Wiz Khalifa making appearances along with avatars of Snoop and Tom Petty. At one point, Snoop visits Tupac in the afterlife and shares a smoke with him.
• Snoop picked a strategic date to release the video: April 20, 2025. 4/20 is a notorious green day when pot smoking is celebrated. It's a tradition that dates back to 1971, when some high school kids in California started using "4:20" as a euphemism for smoking pot. April 20, 2025 also happened to be Easter Sunday.
• This isn't Snoop's first collaboration with a country star in a song celebrating weed. In 2008 he teamed up with Willie Nelson for the song "My Medicine."
• In the documentary The Defiant Ones, which is about Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine, Tom Petty says: "The day Dre does a version of 'Mary Jane's Last Dance,' he's going to have a big hit. That one is just waiting to explode."
  
  It's possible that Jimmy Iovine, who produced the 1979 Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers Damn The Torpedoes album and is a longtime associate of Dr. Dre, facilitated the use of the sample and the use of Petty's likeness in the music video. Petty's quote shows that he was open to the idea of Dr. Dre reworking his song.