Nicotine

“Nicotine” is a song with a clever double-meaning, talking about both smoking and a toxic relationship. Brendon revealed the double-meaning in a track-by-track review with Rock Sound.

Comparing romantic longings with those of drug users is a classic trope in popular music, going back to songs like 1973’s “Love Jones” or even 1932’s “You’re Getting to Be a Habit With Me.” Considering that love actually does cause the production of mind-altering chemicals, this is perhaps unsurprising.

Brendon told Rock Sound:

" number five, ‘Nicotine.’ Yeah, I smoke cigarettes and that was, the song is about another experience I went through where this girl that you know is so bad for you, but you just get that late-night call. You call her up like, ‘let me come over.’ And you know she’s bad for you, you know she’s gonna not give a shit about you, but you just keep going back, just like cigarettes. Like, ‘I know you’re not good for me, but I love it, I can’t help it.’ And that’s where the lyric ‘you’re worse than nicotine’ came from. Just matching everything and personifying that cigarette as a woman, and vice versa. We actually wrote that song with, uh, it was me, Dallon, and this great, super-talented guy named Amir. We wrote that in New York and he could relate, he was actually going, Amir was going through that same thing with a girl at the time. Yeah, I really like that one. Musically it’s so different, too, it’s more of a club kind of dance-y song, which I really wanted to incorporate with this record."