"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.
Invisible freeze in the blood-wet grass
Combatants lying by their weapons
Feeling the warm blood
When the air turns cold and no one remains
Freezing the warm blood
And eating its way through and reigns
Men from the desert lands
by the sky-high forsakened hills
Erased by the passing of man's creation
From the cliffs they have watched
over the thousand seas
And witnessed the decay and desperation
As illness and plague have caught them all
No one could heal, no one knew, for no one
had ever the knowledge
Few could they count by the elfin kings
That had seen what beauty had been raped
What ancestors mad with their healthy hands
What erected and what was formed and shaped
The finest art one had ever seen
Spectacular admirement of these mystic lands
One stood there alone, the only one left
Strong enough to survive
He was built by death, he was known by death
And he sings the victorious song
Simple deeds, destruction hands
Defeating its material self
We have left you now,
you will never be found again
Feeble fortune and rotting food
Combatants lying by their weapons
Feeling the warm blood
When the air turns cold and no one remains
Freezing the warm blood
And eating its way through and reigns
Men from the desert lands
by the sky-high forsakened hills
Erased by the passing of man's creation
From the cliffs they have watched
over the thousand seas
And witnessed the decay and desperation
As illness and plague have caught them all
No one could heal, no one knew, for no one
had ever the knowledge
Few could they count by the elfin kings
That had seen what beauty had been raped
What ancestors mad with their healthy hands
What erected and what was formed and shaped
The finest art one had ever seen
Spectacular admirement of these mystic lands
One stood there alone, the only one left
Strong enough to survive
He was built by death, he was known by death
And he sings the victorious song
Simple deeds, destruction hands
Defeating its material self
We have left you now,
you will never be found again
Feeble fortune and rotting food
Lyrics submitted by SongMeanings
Swallowed by a Buried One Lyrics as written by
Lyrics © RESERVOIR MEDIA MANAGEMENT INC
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