Mark, our lead guitarist, wrote this song about a year ago. Mark's a great guitarist (if we do say so ourselves) and a great dude. He's also straight up f***in' bonkers. So, when he walked into our rehearsal space one night and said he'd written a song called "Dead Baby Cocaine Blues", none of us were too surprised.

Strictly speaking, the song is about the practice of prescribing cocaine medicinally at the turn of the century, even for children and babies. The results of that practice were predictably not-so-great and often led to death (this phenomenon has recently gained attention on the Cinemax series, The Knick). The subject fascinated Mark enough to write a song about it.

Beyond the literal translation, though, I think what we're trying to get at is the notion of bad medicine as a metaphor for bad love or toxic relationships. To quote Simone Felice, formerly of the Felice Brothers, we all have a way to love badly. Sometimes in an effort to save someone or something, we break it. That's a tough pill to swallow. No pun intended.

As a band, we love playing this song live. We're big believers in the classic high point / low point set list structure - lots of high energy tunes punctuated with a few soft, low and slow ones. Dead Baby is definitely a high energy one. I think because the title is so absurd, we all feel a responsibility to play with a commensurate level of madness. We typically lose our sh*t when we play Dead Baby Cocaine Blues and we encourage the audience to do the same.

Honestly, we want to entertain people. That's our job, and we don't hesitate to be ridiculous...in fact, that's kind of our thing. So, "Dead Baby Cocaine Blues" fits pretty well into the Sunshine Riot song book.