Songfacts®:

• This song includes the lyric: "I'm thinking 'what was my password?' as the vultures land." Digital Spy asked the band what the thought process was behind that? Guitarist Alex Robertshaw replied: "It's a throw back to the same idea he had when [Jon Higgs] wrote 'MY KZ….' actually. You know, you have all these mundane things in your life and there's a lot of horrible stuff going on around you, and how do you rise above it?"
  
  Drummer Michael Spearman added: "I think it's a good question when you have 24-hour news and you're bombarded with all these stories from around the world. If you actually take all of that in, then you're just going to be depressed. To some degree you do have to put up some barriers and have your own life. It's where that balance lies and how you do that without being selfish or just being a wreck."
• The song was inspired in part by the murder of British aid worker Alan Hanning in Syria. Vocalist Jonathan Higgs told Q magazine: "When they killed Alan Henning in the desert, I really lost it and thought 'What now.'"
• Everything Everything titled their third studio album after this song. Bass guitarist Jeremy Pritchard explained to HMV.com: "It sums everything up nicely because it's multi-layered, it's the notion of transcendence, of trying to live a good life and then it's also talking about extremists and those who commit horrendous acts to try and get to a higher plane."
• Jonathan Higgs explained the song's meaning to XFM radio. The Everything Everything vocalist said it is, "about the horror of the everyday. It's brought on by the emergence of terrorism where people are now thinking how each day could be their last. The song is about an old man who sets himself on fire but I wanted to set it in the normal, everyday to emphasize how strange it is that people have to live with this everyday."
• After all the chaos described in the song, Higgs ends the chorus by singing about a misplaced motor vehicle:
  
  I'm thinking, where in the blazes
  Did I park my car?
  
  Higgs explained in a Reddit AMA: "It's actually a reference to the Evil Dead 3 comic book, Ash says it when he is thinking about going home once he finds the Book of the Dead."
• Higgs told NME that he considers singing to the pro-EU left wingers "a pointless form of expression" that "bores me more than I can describe."
  
  "There are quite a lot of people that think something different," he argued. "Why don't we try to put the whole conflict into our art? With 'Get To Heaven', for the whole record I was trying to sympathize or empathize with f---ing ISIS, who I despise, but I still tried to make a record about why it's happening and what to do about it.
  
  Higgs added: "It's the same with Brexit – of course I've got my views and they're the ones you imagine, but it's so much bigger than that and art's a place to explore these things rather than just churn out the same old s--t that everybody knows."
• The lyrics that Jonathan Higgs brought to the table for Get to Heaven were relentlessly downbeat. Mindful of the fact they could be about to make a hugely depressing record, his bandmates response was to write a set of hugely melodic danceable bangers.
  
  "I was really worried about Jon," songwriter Alex Robertshaw recalled to Q Magazine. "He wasn't very well in terms of how much he was being affected by what was going on and the lyrics reflect that. A lot of the positivity in the music was my way of trying to balance it out. I was literally writing that stuff because I was worried that we about to make the most depressing, horrific album of all time."