"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.
Friends of mine don't have the time
For food or wine
Just money is on their minds
Life is sweet
On a one-way street
They're indiscreet
And funny, they'll never meet
I gotta get a two-ton truck [Repeat: x3]
I gotta do it to a duck on a two-ton truck and fade away like Ron Rene
All right, all right
You got the magical mystery tour [Repeat: x3
And Kurt is the Walrus [Repeat: x1]
And the Walrus does funny things to the veins in his left arm
All right
And Michael is now a father, all right
And Michael is now a proud father, all right
And my good friend Michael is now a proud father
And Michael is now a father, all right
And that means Michael's wife is a mother, all right
Up the 13 steps of the gallows walked the condemned man
And time passes very quickly when death is near
After having completed the first step, the condemned man knew there were but 12 left
Before he would meet death and his soul would leave his body
And after having completed the 13 steps the condemned man was met by a giant cloaked figure
And with a quick flick of the wrist the man was dead
And his soul left his body and went down down down
To a place we laughingly refer to as hell
But none of us will ever go there because we're all far too groovy
The man's body was left to rot on the gallows
And a great multitude of black birds came and picked the man's corpse apart
Piece by piece
Limb by limb
Until nothing remained
And his blood melted into the ground below
The gallows was made from a tree created by God
The man's blood dripped into the ground which was created by God
Even the giant cloaked figure which was the man's own end was created by God
Even the man's soul which went down was created by God
Even the black birds which picked the man's corpse apart were created by God
And where was God?
In Flanders Fields the poppies grow
Between the crosses row on row
To mark the dead
To Flanders Fields the hippies go
To smoke the poppies there below
And feed their heads
And they're all friends of mine, each and every one of them, no better or no worse
And we'll probably end up down there together when it's all over
And that's why we say
It's all over and it's all right.
For food or wine
Just money is on their minds
Life is sweet
On a one-way street
They're indiscreet
And funny, they'll never meet
I gotta get a two-ton truck [Repeat: x3]
I gotta do it to a duck on a two-ton truck and fade away like Ron Rene
All right, all right
You got the magical mystery tour [Repeat: x3
And Kurt is the Walrus [Repeat: x1]
And the Walrus does funny things to the veins in his left arm
All right
And Michael is now a father, all right
And Michael is now a proud father, all right
And my good friend Michael is now a proud father
And Michael is now a father, all right
And that means Michael's wife is a mother, all right
Up the 13 steps of the gallows walked the condemned man
And time passes very quickly when death is near
After having completed the first step, the condemned man knew there were but 12 left
Before he would meet death and his soul would leave his body
And after having completed the 13 steps the condemned man was met by a giant cloaked figure
And with a quick flick of the wrist the man was dead
And his soul left his body and went down down down
To a place we laughingly refer to as hell
But none of us will ever go there because we're all far too groovy
The man's body was left to rot on the gallows
And a great multitude of black birds came and picked the man's corpse apart
Piece by piece
Limb by limb
Until nothing remained
And his blood melted into the ground below
The gallows was made from a tree created by God
The man's blood dripped into the ground which was created by God
Even the giant cloaked figure which was the man's own end was created by God
Even the man's soul which went down was created by God
Even the black birds which picked the man's corpse apart were created by God
And where was God?
In Flanders Fields the poppies grow
Between the crosses row on row
To mark the dead
To Flanders Fields the hippies go
To smoke the poppies there below
And feed their heads
And they're all friends of mine, each and every one of them, no better or no worse
And we'll probably end up down there together when it's all over
And that's why we say
It's all over and it's all right.
Add your thoughts
Log in now to tell us what you think this song means.
Don’t have an account? Create an account with SongMeanings to post comments, submit lyrics, and more. It’s super easy, we promise!
More Featured Meanings
Fast Car
Tracy Chapman
Tracy Chapman
Mental Istid
Ebba Grön
Ebba Grön
This is one of my favorite songs. https://fnfgo.io
Dreamwalker
Silent Planet
Silent Planet
I think much like another song “Anti-Matter” (that's also on the same album as this song), this one is also is inspired by a horrifying van crash the band experienced on Nov 3, 2022. This, much like the other track, sounds like it's an extension what they shared while huddled in the wreckage, as they helped frontman Garrett Russell stem the bleeding from his head wound while he was under the temporary effects of a concussion. The track speaks of where the mind goes at the most desperate & desolate of times, when it just about slips away to all but disconnect itself, and the aftermath.
No Surprises
Radiohead
Radiohead
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.
Punchline
Ed Sheeran
Ed Sheeran
Ed Sheeran sings about missing his former partner and learning important life lessons in the process on “Punchline.” This track tells a story of battling to get rid of emotions for a former lover, whom he now realized might not have loved him the same way. He’s now caught between accepting that fact and learning life lessons from it and going back to beg her for another chance.
"Kurt" is Kurt Winter, band member and co-writer of their songs. Magical Mystery Tour is a Beatles album released a few years before Friends of Mine. "Kurt is the Walrus" refers to a song on that Beatles album, "I am the Walrus".
At the time, there was a lot of speculation about who was in the walrus suit on the album cover. I won't describe it here, but it was parodied in a later Beatles' song, "Glass Onion", in which Lennon says "The Walrus was Paul".
The Guess Who hung around with Niel Young before he became famous. Young looked up to Bachmann. They mainly hung around one bar that I forget the name of now. Young even played with them before they became big. Some of them used heroin, which Young swore off after a friend of his died of it. This is referenced in "Friends of Mine" and in Young's "The Needle And The Damage Done."
The original version of "Friends of Mine" is on their post-breakup compilation, This Time Long Ago. Cummings sings about "doing it with your mother" (turned into "do it with a duck") and smothering six month old babies. He was imitating Jim Morrision, BTW. RCA said no effing WAY, and they had to change it for Wheatfield Soul.
Of course here in The Future, the nee-groes sing about things like that all the time but nobody gives a damn because they're nee-groes.
The long raps about death and god in this song and "Hang on to your life" comes from Bachman's confusion about a branch of the jewish-islam-christian mythology which is obsessed with ridiculous bullshit like that. He resolved it, not by realizing that it is indeed ridiculous bullshit, but by converting to mormonism–the stupidest branch in the whole mythological tree except for islam.
In fact, that's why the Guess Who first began to break up; Bachmann kept pushing his dumb-ass religion onto the band and writing it into their lyrics.
Nevertheless, if you listen to the words as sounds, they sound really good, even important. And if you listen to the FEELINGS behind the words in Friends of Mine and Hang on to your Life instead of the literal meanings, the religious references are even poignant, because mythology deals with universal, deep human concerns like death.
BTW, the bizarre, counterproductive ways that so-called "humanity" deals with these concerns made me despair to the point of walking off my nuc engineering job and living naked in a cave. Yes really. tiny url dot com slash kanecave
-- faye kane homeless brain