"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.
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Fast Car
Tracy Chapman
Tracy Chapman
The Night We Met
Lord Huron
Lord Huron
This is a hauntingly beautiful song about introspection, specifically about looking back at a relationship that started bad and ended so poorly, that the narrator wants to go back to the very beginning and tell himself to not even travel down that road. I believe that the relationship started poorly because of the lines:
"Take me back to the night we met:When the night was full of terrors: And your eyes were filled with tears: When you had not touched me yet"
So, the first night was not a great start, but the narrator pursued the relationship and eventually both overcame the rough start to fall in love with each other:
"I had all and then most of you"
Like many relationships that turn sour, it was not a quick decline, but a gradual one where the narrator and their partner fall out of love and gradually grow apart
"Some and now none of you"
Losing someone who was once everything in your world, who you could confide in, tell your secrets to, share all the most intimate parts of your life, to being strangers with that person is probably one of the most painful experiences a person can go through. So Painful, the narrator wants to go back in time and tell himself to not even pursue the relationship.
This was the perfect song for "13 Reasons Why"
Mental Istid
Ebba Grön
Ebba Grön
This is one of my favorite songs. https://fnfgo.io
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.
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.
Nobody has commented on this song, maily because is a relativly unknown song, but this is a great, and I mean great song, to me one of the most underrated. This song is about hope, about looking forward to life, and about a girl.
To me this is not about a woman per se but the LA/Hollywood scene. The people are symbols of how the place and Industry uses you up like a whore and then goes on to another.
This is what Don Henley said in one interview was intro to Hotel California.
Here he compares beatiful woman (and cheap one, though) with California (also beatiful but lacks morale).
To anyone who lived in southern California when this song was first heard the meaning would be instantly known. Don Henley may have given his spin on it but I believe a better source would be Bernie Leadon-the true composer. It isn't about a woman, it's about SoCal with all of it's faults, etc. etc.<br />
The Hollywood Waltz is a descriptive term that the Authors of the Song use to relay a "Theme" of a "shared-behavior" they probably all experienced during the time they lived in Southern California. The common place in time, experiences and (sometimes "fragile") emotional state they were all experiencing as young aspiring (often struggling) Musicians in Los Angeles (particularly Hollywood). Apparently, they had many friends, but not many close "female friends" or "lovers" (at least not many they could trust). The Lyrics bring you into both a time and place (or "mind-set" and "feeling") of a young man appreciating a moment of reflection in his life (during a beautiful time of year.....Springtime.....the Acacias are Blooming...) as he reflects on his (and others') "hollow relationship" with an older, more mature woman, who many they (and presumably others) have "shared" or "loved".....all a part of the Hollywood Scene in the 1970's. The Author(s) have "given-in" to "temptations of the flesh". In this song they very eloquently label this transgression "The Hollywood Waltz". Extremely Poetic, Beautifully Written and Forever a Spring-time Favorite.
@ruby hill2 I think of all 4 of these, you nailed it, although the person who semi-quoted Henley got it right. Henley grew up in the Bible Belt. In the oil patch in central Texas, there was an almost too rigid morality. And he got to LA and saw a close parallel between the beauty and shallowness of so many loose women and an entire part of CA that he found equally shallow, yet an unreal, beautiful place. Part of this was Henley's past, that help lead to this viewpoint, and part of it is that he just flat out got it right about S. Californian morality of that time frame. Had a buddy in Nashville who spent a year going back and forth between LA and NYC, playing with Carl Perkins and his sons in a farewell tour of the legendary, but dying Carl Perkins (Google him if you do not know who Carl was). <br /> <br /> He called me one day and said, "you cannot believe these drop-dead gorgeous girls selling themselves for $50 on Hollywood Blvd. They are plentiful, and cheap (two times over)". This 3 Perkins and my buddy were playing in places like the Troubadour, The Roxy in LA, Max's Kansas City and Electric Circus in NYC. About 5 dates in 2 weeks, then leave for the other coast, and keep repeating for about 9-10 months. He said he was calling from a limo they had access to, and the girls were just trying to get in the limo at every stoplight that was red.
Cluelessness abounds. The "she" of the song is Hollywood. The "Hollywood waltz" is sex.
The first verse of the song makes clear that the narrator is not talking about a woman but a place—Southern California, as named in the first line, for which “Hollywood” is a stand-in. The “lovers” are all those who exploited the place for profit, without reinvesting in its cultural, physical, economic, or aesthetic wellbeing. Principal among those are real estate developers, who Henley and Frey disparaged at length in “The Last Resort” on the Hotel California album the following year (1976):\n\n“Some rich men came and raped the land\nNobody caught \'em\nPut up a bunch of ugly boxes\nAnd Jesus people bought \'em.”\n\nHenley and Frey made clear the intent of both lyrics in the interviews that they gave and the benefits for which they played at the time. They had grown up in Texas and Michigan, respectively, and recognized L.A. as having the most narcissistic culture of any American city other than Las Vegas. \n\nThe other side of the lyric is “She gave much more than she’s taken.” There is more to L.A. that meets the eye. Beneath the tarnished glitter, there are real people doing real work that has contributed to the lives of humans all over the world.