Fear City

I'm not sure what this is about, but like someone mentioned above, I too think that there is a similarity to the song "Alphabet Town" but I would add the alternate version of "Everybody cares, Everybody Understands" as similar too. It even mentions "fear city" in this lyric:

For a moment's rest I leaned against the banister After running upstairs again and again From a place you people never been With all of Fear City's finest following behind Who with a greater skill and resourcefulness After putting me under a wrongful arrest Stuck me out to the desert to dry and die

The first line of Fear City is "Dragged down into lowercase". Letters of the alphabet are lowercase, so this could mean he's being dragged into an area of alphabet town/fear city. Alternatively, lowercase could refer to the lower part of a staircase. In 'Everybody Cares...' he talks about running upstairs again and again and being chased by "Fear City's Finest". I think the staircase is a metaphor for his constant battle with drugs and "Fear City's Finest" could be interpreted either as the forces which drag him down into drug use, or as the forces which chase him away from the drugs (cops, friends, rehab councilors etc.). Its interesting that in "Fear City" the line about the cops follows the line about being dragged down into lowercase, when in 'Everybody Cares...' he's being chased up the staircase by "Fear City's Finest", who certainly sound like cops.

Then, the line "Your broken English over their flat, tired remarks / Still trying to bring some dead beauty back to life" reminds me of a large portion of Alphabet Town. In my interpretation, that song is about Elliott befriending a prostitute who's working name is Constantina but who's real name is unpronounceable. They bond over the fact that neither of them will judge the other and they show each other around Alphabet Town, which I get the feeling is a 'haunted' area full of drug addicts, prostitutes and other living dead. So what if the prostitute with the unpronounceable name is the same woman who speaks with broken english, and she is the one trying to bring her 'dead beauty back to life'? And if Alphabet Town/City and Fear City are the same it makes sense that he expects to see the city dead - again he describes it as a haunted city, which can be interpreted a dead city or a city full of the dead. Another similarity between the two songs is the emphasis on names. In Alphabet Town he says the name of his lover by mistake, and is unable to pronounce the name of his prostitute friend. In Fear City he says "You write your name in all of the places no one goes". It's conceivable that the one writing her name is the same one who has a name he can't pronounce - like since her name can't be spoken she needs to write it everywhere.

It's also possible that he is the one figuratively writing his name in all of the places no one goes - that it's a way of saying he's leaving a piece of himself behind in all those places. The phrase "places no one goes" or something similar is in a couple of songs. In Alphabet town he says he's "running...from a place you people never been". In 'High Times' he says "I don't go where I'm supposed to go / And I don't go really anywhere you know". Definitely similar themes.

As for what the rest of the lines in this song mean - I don't really know, but I'd love to hear some other people's ideas. To me, this song is way more disjointed than most of Elliott's other songs. It really doesn't seem to have a clear story. It feels more like a collection of disparate thoughts or impressions, with each two line stanza being a distinct topic, unrelated to all the others. At least that's how it feels to me.