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Jackson Browne – Shaky Town Lyrics 14 years ago
Shaky Town: San Francisco
10-4: I hear you over radio loud and clear
back door: person behind you watching for police from behind
put the hammer down: hit the gas, go faster than the limit
eighteen wheels: a big rig has 18 wheels

Although Jackson Browne is famous as a liberal pop-folk singer, he played countless country music bars, and he's comparing himself in his period of nomadic touring to the truckers he sang to. Musicians often have to depend on touring to survive, and some broke musicians had to hitch rides with truckers.

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Midnight Oil – My Country Lyrics 14 years ago
I think this refers to the bombing of the al-Amriyah shelter in Baghdad during the gulf war (by American planes).

http://www.dawn.com/2011/02/16/iraq-shelter-bombed-by-us-remains-frozen-in-time.html

And did I hear you say
My country right or wrong

Did you save your face
Did you breach your faith
Women, there were children at the shelter
Now who can stop the hail
When human senses fail
There was never any warning, no escap

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Throwing Muses – Pearl Lyrics 15 years ago
In case it's not obvious, he has problems with women ... they use their sexuality against him, they "flow," and he is also imposing his image of Marie (who doesn't seem to have been happy, but did keep coming back until something unspecified happened) on his new woman, who talks more like a prisoner than a significant other.

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Throwing Muses – Pearl Lyrics 15 years ago
If this helps, I've performed this as a duet, and these are the parts that we have a man and woman sing:

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W: Hot hands ... move things. I write on his wall; I have no mind at all. Hot things ... move him. I write on his wall; I have no heart at all.

M: I think she's a pretty little fool. She holds me down, she flows ... she has a back like Marie.

W: I think he's a crazy bastard, he drives me home, he goes "You have a back, like Marie!" (simultaneously with M).

M: You have a back like Marie ... You have pearls in your eyes, and you use your burning to wrap yourself in, and you use your fever to hide yourself away, and you use sweating to keep me down, and you use your heat to have me, and you use your fire to be stronger than me, and you use your flame against me!

W: I won't come back like Marie... The pearls on my eyes - these pearls on my eyes, they make me blind! I write on your wall, I have no eyes at all ... I write on your wall, I have no eyes at all....

(I've corrected a couple errors in the posted song)

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And this is what the Pearls are a reference to:

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell

Aeriel, The Tempest

Aeriel, an androgynous spirit, was imprisoned in a split in a pine tree for 12 years for being too delicate a spirit to perform Ariel's mistress's horrible duties. Ariel was freed with the death of Sycorax but then had a new, but gentler master, Prospero.

Shakespeare probably derived the fairy's name and tone from Isaiah 29:

Yet I will distress Ariel, and there shall be heaviness and sorrow: and it shall be unto me as Ariel. And I will camp against thee round about, and will lay siege against thee with a mount, and I will raise forts against thee. And thou shalt be brought down, and shalt speak out of the ground, and thy speech shall be low out of the dust, and thy voice shall be, as of one that hath a familiar spirit, out of the ground, and thy speech shall whisper out of the dust.

I think all of that is in the song. And, as usual, the relationship implications could hardly be worse.

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