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Listen/download: “Smoke Break” released on Warrior Songs compilation

Click here to hear/buy my new song “Smoke Break,” just released on the Warrior Songs “Story to Song” project! Your purchase helps to fund Warrior Songs, which paid for the recording of this and other veterans’ songs.

Thank you all for your support of my music and my activism against the wars our government starts without caring about the human toll they take. No matter who’s dropping them, bombs fuck people up. So I’d much rather drop f-bombs … and records.

This song is dedicated to all my smoke break buddies during six years in the Army, and to my incredibly inspiring family in Iraq Veterans Against the War and Warrior Writers, especially Lovella Calica, Jenny Pacanowski and Maggie Martin for creating the space in which this song was written.

Featuring Rachel Colwell on violin.
Recorded and engineered by Charlie Wilson at Sonic Zen Records in Berkeley, CA.

Lyrics:

It’s ten minutes past daybreak
I already need a smoke break
Or else I’ll have a mental break and break somebody’s face
I just found out that my friend’s been blown away
I’m not having a good day

Oh there’s no relief, no release
There’s only this pit
Where we all can sit
Fill our lungs with smoke
Fill our hearts with hope
Just crack a couple jokes and
burn a couple smokes and
then go back to war

It’s ten minutes past noon
And I think I’m gonna swoon
From the heat inside this tent that
Feels like a cocoon
And the whistle of a mortar overhead
Reminds me that I could have been dead

Oh there’s no relief, no release
There’s only this pit
Where we all can sit
Fill our lungs with smoke
Fill our hearts with hope
Just crack a couple jokes and
burn a couple smokes and
then go back to war

It’s ten minutes past midnight
And I’m finally feeling all right
The tip of my cigarette glows with an orange light
And now I hear a mortar’s hit our smoking pit
But that still won’t make me quit

‘Cause there’s no relief, no release
There’s only this pit
Where we all can sit
Fill our lungs with smoke
Fill our hearts with hope
Just crack a couple jokes and
burn a couple smokes and
then go back to war
Then go back to war.