Jacob Hackworth has officially closed the book on one of country music’s most compelling recent heartbreak sagas — and he’s doing it with a cigarette-stained ballad called “Mess That Marlboro Made.”

Out now via MCA/Goat Island Sound, the reflective new track from the Nashville-based singer-songwriter takes a seemingly small moment — a teenager buying a pack of Marlboros and getting grounded by his mom — and traces the ripple effect that one tiny decision had on the rest of his life. What starts as a nostalgic shrug quickly deepens into a meditation on fate, love, and the “what ifs” that haunt us long after a relationship ends. Because that pack of cigarettes? It led to a chance encounter. That encounter led to a relationship. And that relationship led to the kind of heartbreak that eventually leads a guy to pack up and move to Nashville.

Produced with a light, deliberate touch by Jacob Durrett, “Mess That Marlboro Made” leans on warm acoustic instrumentation that gets out of the way and lets Hackworth’s raw, lived-in vocal do the heavy lifting. Co-written by Hackworth with Josh Phillips and Jordan Schmidt, the song feels less like a single and more like a journal entry set to music — which, as it turns out, is exactly the point.

“There is such a strong storytelling element to songwriting, especially in Country, so a lot of my songs feel like they have been pulled directly from the pages of my life,” Hackworth shared. “As I’ve written these individual songs and stories, I’ve realized they’re coming together to tell a larger one, and with each release, listeners can begin to see the bigger picture.”

That bigger picture is a trilogy. If current Top 45-and-climbing radio single “What Took You So Long” — which broke the record for the most first-week adds ever by a new artist when it hit country radio in April — was Chapter One (the confusion and the heartbreak), and last month’s “Help Yourself” was the Final Chapter (the healing, the vindication, the goodbye on his terms), then “Mess That Marlboro Made” is the epilogue. It’s the look back. The quiet moment after the dust settles when you start wondering how different everything might have been if one tiny thing had gone another way.

Watch the official lyric video for “Mess That Marlboro Made” here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=807ZjF9VBhc

Hackworth — already a chart-topping songwriter behind cuts for Bailey Zimmerman, Morgan Wallen, Jelly Roll, Corey Kent, and frequent collaborator Tucker Wetmore — is currently out on his third run of dates with Wetmore, with shows running through the fall and including a stop at Red Rocks Amphitheatre in October. If the trilogy is any indication, whatever he writes next is going to be worth paying attention to.