"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.
Stranger than kindness
Bottled light from hotels
Spilling everything
Wet hand from the volcano
Sobers your skin
Stranger than kindness
You caress yourself
And grind my soft cold bones below
Your map of desire
Burned in your slave
Even a fool can come
A strange lit stair
And find a rope hanging there
Stranger than kindness
Keys rain like heaven's hair
There is no home, there is no bread
We sit at the gate and scratch
The gaunt fruit of passion
Dies in the light
Stranger than kindness
Your sleeping hands, they journey
They loiter
Stranger than kindness
You hold me so carelessly close
Tell me I'm dirty
I'm a stranger
I'm a stranger
I'm a stranger
To kindness
Bottled light from hotels
Spilling everything
Wet hand from the volcano
Sobers your skin
Stranger than kindness
You caress yourself
And grind my soft cold bones below
Your map of desire
Burned in your slave
Even a fool can come
A strange lit stair
And find a rope hanging there
Stranger than kindness
Keys rain like heaven's hair
There is no home, there is no bread
We sit at the gate and scratch
The gaunt fruit of passion
Dies in the light
Stranger than kindness
Your sleeping hands, they journey
They loiter
Stranger than kindness
You hold me so carelessly close
Tell me I'm dirty
I'm a stranger
I'm a stranger
I'm a stranger
To kindness
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The first impression is that the story is pretty clear, as the guy above describes, but there is one detail which I'd like to remark: she undoes the latch without any reasonable explanation.
So, my interpretation is that when the lyrics say "Poor Mary thought that she might die/When she saw the ocean for the first time", Mary feels that now that she's finally seen the sea she's ready to die and also get relieved from all her misery. That's the reason why she, in some way, "offends" Richard Slade by not letting him in and later does something that, unless you make this interpretation (that it is her will to die after she's accomplished her ambition) has no sense: to undo the latch of the door.
That's why the title is "The Kindness of Strangers", to Mary what Richard Slade did was paradoxically an act of kindness, as her death was the thing she strived for. This interpretation also turns ironical the last verses.
"The kindness of strangers" is most famously the last line of 'a streetcar named desire', where it's spoken by Blanche Dubois after being commited to an asylum by the man who raped her, causing her mental breakdown. In a song about a woman being raped and murdered, it's presumably meant with the same sense of bitter irony. The line was 'I have always depended on the kindness of strangers', implying she's also at the mercy of the unkindness of strangers. <br /> It's the same with Mary Bellows, following her heart's desire to see the sea, and finding herself alone, she reaches out and unlatches the door in the hope that Richard Slade will enter and be kind. Clearly he wasn't.