I had wanted to work with Robert Harrison for over twenty years when we finally reached an agreement to start an album project. I had some money from a good job, and an overflowing of demos that we started going through.

Here is the original phone recording demo of Jetpack. Random nonsense lyrics.

vid to come

And then Robert and I did some woodshedding. Cutting the song down to essential parts. Is that second verse moving the story along at all? And he said something in that first songwriting session that bonded us for the record.

“Yeah, Man, we can fuck this song up! ”

Ah, I’d found my co-pilot and navigator.

Here are some of the woodshedding with Robert.

And things took off from there. Robert brought the Sgt. Pepper magic of George Martin into my world. And his overriding matra, “We’re creating a scene around the song. It’s more than the notes and instruments. It’s meta context.” Robert would never say, “meta content,” that was my faulty memory.

Here’s the final track. AUDIO ONLY or a video tribute to the game Jetpack Joyride

Finally, here’s the scene Robert and guitarist Whit Williams created on this song. The singer is trying to learn to fly a jetpack, but he’s not doing well. In the middle part, you can hear Whit’s guitar sounding like a fucked up jetpack. You’ll notice his lead zooms from left to right and back again, as if he’s got the jetpack started, but now we’re revealing the idea. The scene is cool, unexpected, even if you don’t know the story behind it. That’s Robert’s magic.

I present to you: Higher Than Anyone – the new Buzzie collection