The lyrics to Zach Bryan’s “Burn, Burn Burn” read as an epic poem culminating in three repeating choruses with Bryan’s escalating screaming of the lines "Burn Burn Burn.” It is a beautiful poem about a man’s yearning for a simpler life away from the deafening, conformist society. When he surprisingly released it on September 8, 2022 after a twitter user asked for it on streaming platforms, Bryan captained his accompanying instagram post “to my favorite Kerouac line.” 

Bryan’s admiration of beatnik author Jack Kerouac has been well documented on his social media platforms, with posts and pictures remembering the late author who voiced a generation of counterculture poets. The inspiring “burn, burn, burn” quote comes from Kerouac's second semi-autobiographical novel “On The Road,” where narrator Sal Paradise details his traverses hitchhiking and driving across the nation, in search of adventure, God, and his eccentric friend Dean Moriarty. In the first few pages of this time-capsule novel, Paradise delivers this beautiful line, writing:

Zach Bryan’s song “Burn, Burn, Burn” was written in response to this quote, and it is through this lens that his profound lyrics should be analyzed and contextualized.

Kerouac’s early admission that his soulmates are the ones who “burn, burn, burn” is supported by the adventures in the resulting novel. Jack Kerouac was the center of the beatnik generation of the 1950s, a post-war reaction to the materialism and conformity of the “golden era” mainstream culture. Living off GI checks, Kerouac and his character Sal  Paradise traveled between San Francisco and New York, two centers of this cultural renaissance, searching for their Gods amidst the American frontier.

It is easy to see why Zach Bryan was drawn to this quote, and indeed it is one of Kerouac’s most famous lines. This stream-of-consciousness line is representative of the writing style that made “On the Road'' such a literary masterpiece. Kerouac wrote in the rambling, never-ending style of a jazz solo, with long sentences filled with profound statements, so when spoken, the characters deliver their lines with vibrant enthusiasm for minutes, never pausing to take a breath and pilling words atop each other as if they would lose their ability to speak afterwards. With unbridled enthusiasm, Kerouc’s character vomits words and ideas with the hope that together, a profound truth will emerge. And they often do. This style of speaking and writing is exemplary of the people who “burn, burn, burn,” forgoing arbitrary stopping points like commas, periods, and conventional grammar rules and instead letting unfiltered words form their own sentences as they escape their lips.

Most characters in the novel are based on Kerouac’s real-life friends, a time capsule of a generation of poets and truly independent thinkers. Friends like Dean Moriarty, based on Neal Cassady, exemplify what it means to “burn, burn, burn”: always searching for more experiences, new truths, delirious with visions and epiphanies in a manner edging on madness. These characters never settle down, yearning for new women, friends, and never-ending nights in strange lands. These are the people who are “mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved,” who are so spontaneous they can never be counted on to stay in the same city for more than a month. Ultimately, these endearingly mad people explode like fireworks (those “fabulous yellow roman candles), spreading their light across the sky as they plummet to the ground.

If one thought that Zach Bryan’s song “burn, burn, burn” would reflect this ethos, they would be disappointed. Rather than explore the quote and the people that Kerouac yearn for, Bryan wrote his piece as a response to his vision, stating in his instagram post and tweet that it was “to my favorite Kerouac line.” The thoughts, themes, and ideas in Bryan’s lyrics represent the life and people he yearns for, and how those people “burn, burn, burn” in their own ways.

Like Kerouac, Bryan writes about feeling out of place conforming to mainstream culture. In his first verse, he laments that:

The following verses delve further into Bryan’s search for truth and raw emotion away from society, alone and connecting to the spirit of the earth. It is an almost transcendentalist embrace of nature as he longs to lie in fields underneath the stars, still yearning for a home he hasn’t found despite his spiritual connection to his Christian Maker. Continuing with themes of escaping and running present in his earlier songs like “Traveling Man,” Bryan delivers this Kerouac-esq line that references one of Sal Paradise’s whims to travel to Europe (‘head to Paris on a late night flight”)  and live like the Lost Generation of writer, “write a few poems on a sunny balcony.” 

The verses of this epic poem culminate in Bryan admitting he is a simple man yearning for a simple life filled only with pure and true emotions and “human touch.” The line “I’m tired now, so I'm bringin' my ass home” flows into three repeating verses, where Bryan ultimately tells the final lines “So let me go down the line //We all burn, burn, burn, and then die.” This “burning,” is the use of life force: Bryan is praying to live his life, to spend his life force, so that he can feel all the profound emotions of the human experience. Burning is to live, to follow your destiny, age, and feel all the joys of growing within this world. It is a simple life, and a simple burning, one that is achieved by being conscious of the magic in everything.

This is not the same meaning of “burn, burn burn,” that Keroauc used when describing the eccentric characters he eagerly trails across the country. Those like Dean Mortiary burn in a fiery way, like a rotting piece of wood sporadically exploding into sparks. They consume all the oxygen in their vicinity, lighting their surroundings with a flickering, jumping flame. These people burn like fireworks, quickly consuming their fuse until they reach the shell and burst “like yellow roman candles,” exploding in twinkling light across the horizon. This is an eager, fervent, almost desperate burning, like a short, bright, bursting flame. Bryan’s burning is almost low and slow, a patient fuse burning as he ambles “down the line.” “The tone of his poem and his vision for his future argue for a simple, slow, beautiful life filled with constant emotion and constant warmth. This is a slow flame, a glowing embers that is ever constant, ever bright, and stops time with its stagnant heat. These people who “burn, burn, burn,” do so in a steady and reliable manner.

Bryan’s interpretation of Kerouac’s “burn, burn, burn,” echoes themes of simplicity and calm established in songs on his album “American Heartbreak.” In “The Outskirts,” “This Road I Know” and “The Good I’ll do,” Bryan outlines the mundane and pure emotion in his visions: the house on the hill with a lovely woman inside it exuding warmth and joy. For him, to “burn, burn, burn” is to achieve this life and glow constantly within it. For Kerouac, to “burn, burn, burn '' is to consume everything in proximity, gasping for air in a yelping debate, dash across the country and back and live every night as if the mysterious cover of darkness lasts for eternity. Kerouac is a breathless writer and Paradise a breathless character, and the burn must be done with urgency and giddy glee. While Bryan has also expressed this ethos in songs like “Younger Years” and “Revival,” those tendencies are left to the past and his vision for the future is to live life constantly and consciously aware of the simple things.