Blitzen Trapper shares “Dead Billie Jean,” the third track from their Yep Roc Records debut, Holy Smokes Future Jokes, out September 11.

BrooklynVegan premiered the song and video, noting that the song “works in the title star of Michael Jackson’s 1983 hit — not to mention a few dead rock stars — into the heady psychedelic universe of this album… a groovy, jammy Blitzen Trapper-style folk number.”

Led by existential questions about life and death, Holy Smokes Future Jokes finds frontman and lyricist Eric Earley ruminating on the intermediate period between a person’s separate lives on earth, “and what it means to escape the cycle of birth and rebirth.”

Of the track he notes, “Pulling together Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo and MJ’s Billie Jean wherein the real Billie Jean has indeed killed herself as she promised Michael she would and now living in a state of rock and roll immortality kicks it in the Intermediate States with Jim Morrison, Brian Jones and Abraham Lincoln(?!) smoking mad dope, though she remains unaware of her death somehow as though her death ultimately was an awakening and reinvention.”

On August 28, Holy Smokes Future Jokes will be released on limited edition red, yellow & blue splatter vinyl exclusively at local record stores, two weeks before the September 11 official street date. Pre-order is now available.

Pre-order Holy Smokes Future Jokes via the Y-Store now and get FREE shipping.  First Edition LPs feature two-tone cloudy blue vinyl ️and are available ONLY via the Y-Store and Bandcamp.

Tags: Blitzen Trapper, Holy Smokes Future Jokes, New Album, New Release, New Video