"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.
I was fourteen
She Was Twelve
Father travelled - hers as well
Europa
Down the beaches
Hand in hand
Twelfth of never on the sand
Then war took her away
We swore a vow that day:
We'll be the Pirate Twins again, Europa
Oh my country, Europa
I'll stand beside you in the rain, Europa
Ta republique...
Nine years after, who'd I see
On the cover of a magazine?
Europa
Buy her singles and see all her films
Paste her pictures on my windowsill
But that's not quite the same - It isn't, is it?
Europa my old friend...
We'll be the Pirate Twins again
Europa
Oh my country.
Europa
I'll stand beside you in the rain
Europa
Ta republique...
Blew in from the hoverport
She was back in London
Pushed past the papermen
Calling her name
She smiled for the cameras
As a bodyguard grabbed me
Then here eyes were gone forever
As they drove her away...
We'll be the Pirate Twins again, Europa
Oh my country, Europa
I'll stand beside you in the rain Europa
Ta republique
She Was Twelve
Father travelled - hers as well
Europa
Down the beaches
Hand in hand
Twelfth of never on the sand
Then war took her away
We swore a vow that day:
We'll be the Pirate Twins again, Europa
Oh my country, Europa
I'll stand beside you in the rain, Europa
Ta republique...
Nine years after, who'd I see
On the cover of a magazine?
Europa
Buy her singles and see all her films
Paste her pictures on my windowsill
But that's not quite the same - It isn't, is it?
Europa my old friend...
We'll be the Pirate Twins again
Europa
Oh my country.
Europa
I'll stand beside you in the rain
Europa
Ta republique...
Blew in from the hoverport
She was back in London
Pushed past the papermen
Calling her name
She smiled for the cameras
As a bodyguard grabbed me
Then here eyes were gone forever
As they drove her away...
We'll be the Pirate Twins again, Europa
Oh my country, Europa
I'll stand beside you in the rain Europa
Ta republique
Lyrics submitted by Kato
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Fast Car
Tracy Chapman
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When We Were Young
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This is a sequel to 2001's "Reckless Abandon", and features the band looking back on their clumsy youth fondly.
No Surprises
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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.
Blue
Ed Sheeran
Ed Sheeran
“Blue” is a song about a love that is persisting in the discomfort of the person experiencing the emotion. Ed Sheeran reflects on love lost, and although he wishes his former partner find happiness, he cannot but admit his feelings are still very much there. He expresses the realization that he might never find another on this stringed instrumental by Aaron Dessner.
Plastic Bag
Ed Sheeran
Ed Sheeran
“Plastic Bag” is a song about searching for an escape from personal problems and hoping to find it in the lively atmosphere of a Saturday night party. Ed Sheeran tells the story of his friend and the myriad of troubles he is going through. Unable to find any solutions, this friend seeks a last resort in a party and the vanity that comes with it.
“I overthink and have trouble sleepin’ / All purpose gone and don’t have a reason / And there’s no doctor to stop this bleedin’ / So I left home and jumped in the deep end,” Ed Sheeran sings in verse one. He continues by adding that this person is feeling the weight of having disappointed his father and doesn’t have any friends to rely on in this difficult moment. In the second verse, Ed sings about the role of grief in his friend’s plight and his dwindling faith in prayer. “Saturday night is givin’ me a reason to rely on the strobe lights / The lifeline of a promise in a shot glass, and I’ll take that / If you’re givin’ out love from a plastic bag,” Ed sings on the chorus, as his friend turns to new vices in hopes of feeling better.
Cool song. One of my all time favorites.
The lyrics are pretty self explanitory. A young boy and girl who are in love are separated and 9 years later he finds out she's a big star. Sadly he never gets to reunite with her.
This is a pioneering synth-pop song from Thomas Dolby. His album The Golden Age Of Wireless is probably one of the greatest debut albums of all time. There isn't one dud on the album. An electronic classic.
As Dolby has said, the whole album is about the "sense of a relationship that's going on as being overwhelmed by something on a grander scale", but that fits each song in a different way. He's also said the song has "a very strong wartime atmosphere to it", and that it's in part about how strange it is to grow up only one generation away from WWII.
It's not a coincidence that the girl is named Europa, or that she's French. In late 1972 (9 years before Thomas Dolby wrote this song, when he was 14 years old), the UK was in negotiations to join the European Community. Even if you missed all the "my country, ta république" on the news, you couldn't miss the references in everything from Doctor Who to the Wombles.
Of course to 14-year-old Thomas, major geopolitical events like that are just unimportant backdrop to what really matters: him and his Pirate Twin.
Meanwhile, "war took her away" is phrasing from WWII-set romances, but obviously she's not being shipped off to fight the Nazis, she's just going off with her French diplomat father to Tokyo to try to arbitrate between the US and North Vietnam, and he's romanticizing based on movies he's seen on telly. (Especially since most of the French girls he's seen on telly have been in those movies.)
To 14-year-old Thomas, summer 1972 isn't about the EEC and Vietnam negotiations, it's about him and Europa. To 23-year-old Thomas—he knows there were momentous things going on, and putting them unnoticed in the background is a way to remind us of what it felt like to be 14.
And the great thing is that it works even for people who don't get any of the connections. You don't have to know why the girl is named Europa, you can even mishear "ta république" as some nonsense phrase in English, and the feeling still comes across.
@falcotron Beautiful explanation. I love this song. Very bittersweet. I can picture the two of them as young kids, oblivious to the rest of the world but living great fantasy as adventurers. Just a great use of the language. Funny how perfect language can put full "movies" in your head. There was the kid in "Mrs. Peregrine's School..." that could project thoughts as movies. What a great power that could be!
Two teen sweethearts are forced by circumstances to part. Flash forward to adulthood, and Our Hero finds that his former sweetheart is a celebrated actress and tries to contact her, but the bodyguard assumes he's just some nutjob stalker so he never gets the chance to reclaim her heart.
Sure, the song is self explanatory but I once heard an interview w/ Thomas Dolby in which he stated the song was autobiographical. So who is the female to whom this song refers?
She was from Leipzig, behind the 'Iron Curtain". I dont know more than that.
@shuboo I think you're thinking about a 1992 Radio 1 interview about Astronauts & Heretics, where he talked about how "Europa" and its new sequel "Eastern Bloc" are semi-autobiographical.<br /> <br /> But there isn't a girl who literally fits all the details of the two songs. This fits with everything else about Thomas Dolby's romanticized past. He wasn't really raised in Cairo, his grandfather wasn't a mad Victorian inventor, Dolby isn't his real middle name, and his 14-year-old sweetheart wasn't a French girl named Europa who became an A-list movie star slash pop singer.<br /> <br /> He did have a chaste summer quasi-romance with a foreign (apparently East German) girl when he was around 14, and he a girlfriend who "I used to think each time we kissed it was for real", and a girlfriend who later became somewhat famous (before he did), but they're not all the same girl, and none of them are anyone whose secret identity would make you think "Ah, now I get it". He's merged them all into one girl, and given her a perfectly symbolic name, and made her French, for the purposes of this song (and similarly for its sequel). Of course they're all important, but only in the same way that anyone's childhood sweetheart is important.
being a giant xtc fan, that is how i found thomas dolby, as the lead of xtc, andy partridge, played harmonica and drums in many of the songs. cant believe 'urges' by thomas dolby isnt on here!
In a magazine interview somewhere around 1982-3, Dolby talks about how the instrumentation in this song parallels the lyrics in combining past (pre-rock R&B) and present (synthpop) sounds—the harmonica alternating with the synth lead; the blatantly synthetic drum machine sounds playing a classic Bo Diddley beat, and also alternating with real handclaps; etc.
One option that no one mentions, and which seems very likely to me, is that the entire story is a delusion on the part of the narrator. For a long time I considered this a lovely story of interrupted childhood romance, and then I took another look at the video, as well as some of his others (I was on a Utube nostalgia kick, as sometimes happens).
I noticed that in many of the videos where Dolby "plays" the narrator (as opposed to simple concert footage) the narrator is portrayed as being mentally off balance, if not outright crazy. Specifically in the E&TPT video the use of the white veil to bind and blind him, and his extreme twitchiness and intense glares throughout, would seem to show that the character Dolby portrays is less than stable. For me the clincher is during the line "some bodyguard grabed me..." In the video, it is NOT bodyguards who grab him, but rather two guys in white medical coats. And, after dragging him away, he apparently gets tossed back into his beachside illusion.
Given this, as well as the way Dolby has portrayed other less than sane characters (She Blinded Me With Science, for example) really puts the truthfulness of the narrators' story into doubt. And if you think about it, it does sound like the kind of story that a crazed stalker fan might make up to justify his/her actions.
Dolby said that the song is kinda/sorta autobiographical, but this doesn't mean the details are true. He could have based the story on a relationship from his childhood, but then embellished it to create the songs' narrative.
Is this the true interpretation? I don't know. But I think we have to admit that it COULD be. And frankly, not knowing for sure makes the song even more awesome.
@bennett115 Great mental picture there! Thanks for another way to look at it!
@bennett115 Great mental picture there! Thanks for another way to look at it!
Hello, Leia Taylor at Port Dickson beach...