"Fast car" is kind of a continuation of Bruce Springsteen's "Born to Run." It has all the clawing your way to a better life, but in this case the protagonist never makes it with her love; in fact she is dragged back down by him.
There is still an amazing amount of hope and will in the lyrics; and the lyrics themselve rank and easy five. If only music was stronger it would be one of those great radio songs that you hear once a week 20 years after it was released. The imagery is almost tear-jerking ("City lights lay out before us", "Speeds so fast felt like I was drunk"), and the idea of starting from nothing and just driving and working and denigrating yourself for a chance at being just above poverty, then losing in the end is just painful and inspiring at the same time.
This is the dance
That brings the dead to the living
Just say "I miss you
Every day you know"
This is the dance
That brings the dead to the living
They say "I'm with you
Every day you know"
This is the dance
That brings the dead to the living
Just say "I miss you
Every day you know"
This is the dance
That brings the dead to the living
They say "I'm with you
Every day you know"
Can you hear them come? (x8)
This is the dance
That brings the dead to the living
Just say "I miss you
Every day you know"
That brings the dead to the living
Just say "I miss you
Every day you know"
This is the dance
That brings the dead to the living
They say "I'm with you
Every day you know"
This is the dance
That brings the dead to the living
Just say "I miss you
Every day you know"
This is the dance
That brings the dead to the living
They say "I'm with you
Every day you know"
Can you hear them come? (x8)
This is the dance
That brings the dead to the living
Just say "I miss you
Every day you know"
Lyrics submitted by aphid360
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Fast Car
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Ed Sheeran
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I hear this as the insanity that follows their refusal to accept the realization and consequence of their traumatic experience. They enter a world in which their dead child has been revived after a ritual. But the observer is ignorant about the demons that come and take what you hold most precious and most holy and is therefore unable to enter this world. The observer would ask why they're acting so strange, and they'd respond with this song.
The years behind me aren't many, so I can neither boast the love a parent sends his child, nor can I imagine the grief he feels after his right to love it is taken away, but I imagine most parents would wholeheartedly follow the passion of their hearts and ignore the blistering logic of their brains for eternities if it at the end of this track lay, gently and alive, their baby. These two do.
While I'm not implying an interpretation of them as mentally unstable, I hear there are several moments, through darkness or out the day, where they escape into the bliss of the memories of their baby love.