In this episode, Rob Getzschman, the man behind Analog Jetpack, shares the story behind their song, “Bury Me In My Jetpack.” The band is originally from Washington, DC, and currently based in Los Angeles, and their comic strip and unique aesthetic are Rob’s inspiration as well.

“Bury Me In My Jetpack” owes a great debt to the fingerpicking style I learned from Dave Van Ronk. More specifically, I love his arrangement of Leadbelly’s “Death Letter Blues”, and I remember thinking, “I really love this song, so to honor it best, I should rip it off.” You know, aspiring to the aphorism that great artists steal. So if you listen to them side-by-side, you’ll notice the fingerpicking in the verses play in a similar style and the same key. To that I added a power-chord chorus as a hard-rock adaptation to the style I admire so much. And in the second verse, I worked in a direct homage to “Death Letter Blues”, which has a line that goes, “You never miss the water ’til the well runs dry”.

I think I had some of the lyrics before the thought came to tweak “Death Letter Blues.” That song is about going a man going to the train station to collect the body of his dead lover. “Bury Me In My Jetpack” plays on a similar blues theme, the post-mortem instructions: “See that my grave is kept clean”; “Bury me deep with a pan of molasses buried at my feet”; etc, but it updates that theme with a technological request. Beyond being cheeky, the practical purpose of a jetpack is to get to heaven.

The lyrics add up to an anthem against religious dogma. If you preach to me about Armageddon and purgatory, I’ll preach to you about science and jetpacks. The second verse even paraphrases the Bible, which reads, “If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you”. That tells a different story than Memphis Minnie, who sang, “If it keeps on raining, the levee’s going to break.” So the song sort of presents the disparity between the promises of religion and the reality of the blues.

Bury Me In My Jetpack

They left a little light on in purgatory for me
But they saved the whole seventh circle for you
‘Cause I know the gates of hell are just mythology a-calling
But you swear it’s all the god’s honest truth

Chorus:
So when I die, you may bury me in my jetpack
With nary a hint of setback ’cause I am gone
And you may lay me deep and pile that earth on easy
And I will trade the dirt for breezes when I turn that sucker on

You never miss the water until your well, well, well hits a dry spell
And you’ll pray on the day that the levee breaks
And ain’t it just a sad, sad song to think catastrophe just has to be
But you say that it only takes a grain of faith

(chorus)

So when the heights rain fire and the hailstorms set on
I will fire my pack and meet the horsemen head on
‘Cause I am a child of the sky and the heavens
And I won’t be caught underground for Armageddon

(chorus)