The song lyrics were written by the band Van Halen, as they were asked to write a song for the 1979 movie "Over the Edge" starring Matt Dillon. The movie (and the lyrics, although more obliquely) are about bored, rebellious youth with nothing better to do than get into trouble. If you see the movie, these lyrics will make more sense. It's a great movie if you grew up in the 70s/80s you'll definitely remember some of these characters from your own life. Fun fact, after writing the song, Van Halen decided not to let the movie use it.
Blacktop pavement cover me
Like a chemical reaction or a steam roller
Spreading randomly
There's a distant and a low frequency
It tickles my ear, it rumbles under my feet
And it shakes the leaves off of every tree (violently)
What pretension! Everlasting peace
Everything must cease
Institution on the Hill
Like a beacon in the mind of an ancestor
To ignite a people's will
There's a shadowed stain on the west facade
It has spread like decay to enshroud the fraud
And the descendants find oh so odd
(oh so odd)
What pretension! Everlasting peace
Everything must cease
Grave memorial hewn white stone
Like the comforting caress of a mother
Or a friend you've always known
It evokes such pain and significance
What was once, is reduced to rememberence
And the generations pass without recompense
What pretension! Everlasting peace
Everything must cease
Like a chemical reaction or a steam roller
Spreading randomly
There's a distant and a low frequency
It tickles my ear, it rumbles under my feet
And it shakes the leaves off of every tree (violently)
What pretension! Everlasting peace
Everything must cease
Institution on the Hill
Like a beacon in the mind of an ancestor
To ignite a people's will
There's a shadowed stain on the west facade
It has spread like decay to enshroud the fraud
And the descendants find oh so odd
(oh so odd)
What pretension! Everlasting peace
Everything must cease
Grave memorial hewn white stone
Like the comforting caress of a mother
Or a friend you've always known
It evokes such pain and significance
What was once, is reduced to rememberence
And the generations pass without recompense
What pretension! Everlasting peace
Everything must cease
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Light Up The Sky
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This is a hauntingly beautiful song about introspection, specifically about looking back at a relationship that started bad and ended so poorly, that the narrator wants to go back to the very beginning and tell himself to not even travel down that road. I believe that the relationship started poorly because of the lines:
"Take me back to the night we met:When the night was full of terrors: And your eyes were filled with tears: When you had not touched me yet"
So, the first night was not a great start, but the narrator pursued the relationship and eventually both overcame the rough start to fall in love with each other:
"I had all and then most of you"
Like many relationships that turn sour, it was not a quick decline, but a gradual one where the narrator and their partner fall out of love and gradually grow apart
"Some and now none of you"
Losing someone who was once everything in your world, who you could confide in, tell your secrets to, share all the most intimate parts of your life, to being strangers with that person is probably one of the most painful experiences a person can go through. So Painful, the narrator wants to go back in time and tell himself to not even pursue the relationship.
This was the perfect song for "13 Reasons Why"
Dreamwalker
Silent Planet
Silent Planet
I think much like another song “Anti-Matter” (that's also on the same album as this song), this one is also is inspired by a horrifying van crash the band experienced on Nov 3, 2022. This, much like the other track, sounds like it's an extension what they shared while huddled in the wreckage, as they helped frontman Garrett Russell stem the bleeding from his head wound while he was under the temporary effects of a concussion. The track speaks of where the mind goes at the most desperate & desolate of times, when it just about slips away to all but disconnect itself, and the aftermath.
When We Were Young
Blink-182
Blink-182
This is a sequel to 2001's "Reckless Abandon", and features the band looking back on their clumsy youth fondly.
Page
Ed Sheeran
Ed Sheeran
There aren’t many things that’ll hurt more than giving love a chance against your better judgement only to have your heart crushed yet again. Ed Sheeran tells such a story on “Page.” On this track, he is devastated to have lost his lover and even more saddened by the feeling that he may never move on from this.
This is straight from Greg's mouth, from the Q&A session at the reception for his lifetime achievement award from the Harvard Humanist Chaplaincy in 2008.(- marks are where he interrupted a thought with another one)
Questioner: Tonight you played Cease ... I just wanted to have some insight into that song. What personal experiences helped inspire the lyrics?
Greg: It wasn't an inspiration, really. ... I started writing the first verse- The first verse talks about blacktop spreading endlessly, like a chemical reaction. And that was because, it's really, umm, boring, that I'm going to reveal this to you. But that's just because they were cutting down a lot of trees in our neighborhood and expanding this housing development and we have this beautiful pristine forest in the back of our property that is labeled for destruction. At the time that title came out, they decided to expand the neighborhood. And that's what got me- so the first verse talks about destruction and the end of eco systems basically. And then I thought, 'Let's build on this, what are other things that cease?' And the second verse is about social movements that have come and gone. And then the third verse is about family and interpersonal relationships, and it just so happens that was at a time when I was getting a divorce.
I guess it's not about religion. That everlasting peace bit almost had me convinced. lol