"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.
Volcano pierce the air, ashes block out the sun.
Down in the lair, well I met her there
With a price for everyone.
I paid eighty dollars for this wedding ring,
I couldn't take it off if I tried.
And the cactus sure tastes strangely sweet
As it goes down inside
I dream I'm safe in my hotel womb.
Soft and soul made, it's a wonderful room.
I wish I'm back in my hotel womb.
Slip through the crack, to that wonderful room.
Sudden voltage in the night, with a rainforest girl.
As we float downstream to the Amazon River
Where the black waters swirl.
I say, why are you people wearing those masks?
I say, can we be reconciled?
She says the mother of the storm has to roam the sky
Searching for her child. (Chorus)
Morning comes at last, and she's lying by my side.
She's got the face of the widow who keeps following me
And the body of my bride.
I say, why are those buildings swaying like trees?
I say, can we stop for a while?
She says, can't you hear the city that's hidden in there?
It's just another mile. (Chorus)
Down in the lair, well I met her there
With a price for everyone.
I paid eighty dollars for this wedding ring,
I couldn't take it off if I tried.
And the cactus sure tastes strangely sweet
As it goes down inside
I dream I'm safe in my hotel womb.
Soft and soul made, it's a wonderful room.
I wish I'm back in my hotel womb.
Slip through the crack, to that wonderful room.
Sudden voltage in the night, with a rainforest girl.
As we float downstream to the Amazon River
Where the black waters swirl.
I say, why are you people wearing those masks?
I say, can we be reconciled?
She says the mother of the storm has to roam the sky
Searching for her child. (Chorus)
Morning comes at last, and she's lying by my side.
She's got the face of the widow who keeps following me
And the body of my bride.
I say, why are those buildings swaying like trees?
I say, can we stop for a while?
She says, can't you hear the city that's hidden in there?
It's just another mile. (Chorus)
Lyrics submitted by iceblink-luck
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Fast Car
Tracy Chapman
Tracy Chapman
Gentle Hour
Yo La Tengo
Yo La Tengo
This song was originally written by a guy called Peter Gutteridge. He was one of the founders of the "Dunedin Sound" a musical scene in the south of New Zealand in the early 80s. From there it was covered by "The Clean" one of the early bands of that scene (he had originally been a member of in it's early days, writing a couple of their best early songs). The Dunedin sound, and the Clean became popular on american college radio in the mid to late 80s. I guess Yo La Tengo heard that version.
Great version of a great song,
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.
No Surprises
Radiohead
Radiohead
Same ideas expressed in Fitter, Happier are expressed in this song. We're told to strive for some sort of ideal life, which includes getting a good job, being kind to everyone, finding a partner, getting married, having a couple kids, living in a quiet neighborhood in a nice big house, etc. But in Fitter, Happier the narrator(?) realizes that it's incredibly robotic to live this life. People are being used by those in power "like a pig in a cage on antibiotics"--being pacified with things like new phones and cool gadgets and houses while being sucked dry. On No Surprises, the narrator is realizing how this life is killing him slowly. In the video, his helmet is slowly filling up with water, drowning him. But he's so complacent with it. This is a good summary of the song. This boring, "perfect" life foisted upon us by some higher powers (not spiritual, but political, economic, etc. politicians and businessmen, perhaps) is not the way to live. But there is seemingly no way out but death. He'd rather die peacefully right now than live in this cage. While our lives are often shielded, we're in our own protective bubbles, or protective helmets like the one Thom wears, if we look a little harder we can see all the corruption, lies, manipulation, etc. that is going on in the world, often run by huge yet nearly invisible organizations, corporations, and 'leaders'. It's a very hopeless song because it reflects real life.
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 SUCH an incredibly beautiful and adventurous song. I don't usually bother to comment, but I can't leave with the only interpretation here (just prior to mine) suggesting . . . cannibalism. I won't denigrate someone else's comment -- everyone's view on art is valid in some relative space, but I'll offer something for balance that may be a tad more relative to most people's heads.
This song is a beautiful fugue, a daze, a psychedelic Indiana Jones dream overlaid with Goddess myth. All the references to a woman in the song are dreamlike, suggestive of that feminine spirit ideal, eros, that we all desire to guide us at one time or another.
I picture Steve K. checking in, maybe he just did a show in Brazil, where he fed off the energy of his fans for a great show even though he was already wiped out from the long flight. Now returns to his hotel completely exhausted -- most everyone who travels can relate to this -- where he falls straightaway on the bed and drifts off.
Dreaming, he's immersed in a Native American shamanic ceremony, which is most often a psychedelic trip of male confirmation. But somehow this feminine spirit, imagine it as eros or anima, transforms it into a betrothal, a marriage ceremony. Now "married," he won't be able to shake off ("couldn't take it off if I tried") this feminine eros spirit, goddess persona, dragging him toward adventure.
In dream-word, he drifts. Probably outside the dream he fell asleep undressed, and hence he drifts back toward consciousness in this hotel womb, waking up a bit (how else do you remember any of your dreams?). It is the dangers in the dream (and the subconscious need to get undressed for bed proper) which direct him back to someplace secure, to "home." And when you're on the road, that is always . . . the hotel room. Safety.
But the fugue is too great, the anima carries him onward to the next adventure. Within the dream, he recalls the safety of the hotel . . . no, wait, he thinks, THAT must be the dream . . . Dream life, as anyone dreaming vividly knows, it is all too real. So his anima pulls him to adventure (always more real), while his insecurity looks backward to safety. Hence in dream-time he dreams of the safety of his hotel womb. They are both dualistic sides of his goddess myth, she encompasses both.
He is transported by her further into the dream role, becoming her "Indiana Jones" . . . yet all the way typically reluctant, just as Indiana was. In the song, our hero seems to drag his heels when he finds himself floating down the Amazon river, or else waking up amidst buildings "swaying like trees." Yet she incites him onward to the next frame. He yearns for the softness of the hotel, which is also the softness of her womb; while instead she brings him to immediacy of the moment. The Mother of the Storm is searching for her son.
Alternately, he yearns back towards wakefulness, womb, and safety. He asks her, why can't the danger represented by the masks be reconciled? As his eros and anima, in response she does extend her womb, but later also presses him on. The Lost City is "just another mile" ahead.
philipkindred possibly has written the most beautiful interpretation of a song I've ever seen on here.
From what I know, this song is about nightmares of cannibalism. I like the line, She's got the face of the widow that keeps following me", because it could refer to a black widow spider (they eat their partners).
not cannibalism...
the other comment is a nice interpretation.
I think it's about heroin use myself... something that unfortunately snagged Kilbey for quite a bit there. Look at the lyrics through that lens (as in "Heroin, it's my life and it's my wife")... "Hotel Womb"... temporarily returning to the womb in a heroin trip.
"'I was deliriously in love with opium and heroin. I was using them every day … drugs were becoming very important to me. People can only visit that space for a short time with narcotics. Quickly the honeymoon is over. But in that brief period I found a muse. I found a mojo. I found a state that I wanted to imitate with music and I wanted to let people in on this state. I thought it was something worth trying to replicate.'' - Steve Kilbey<br /> <br /> That quote is about the "Priest = Aura" record a few years later, but I think it speaks to parts of "Starfish" and "Gold Afternoon Fix (kind of beat us over the head with that one, didn't he?)." Psychedelic music is all about altered states of perception, and it came into being as a way to recreate the moods and experiences of drug trips. But there's definitely a difference in the "pot, pills and acid" sound of the early Church records up to "Heyday" and then the opioid-tinged period of "Starfish" onward for a few.
I'm thinking more like peyote or some other hallucinogenic. Maybe Peruvian torch cactus (mescaline)...?
Most beautiful song EVER.