I did and always have interpreted this song as being a first-person narrative about someone's experience of dying in a car accident. "Last thing I remember.....", then the "headlights are getting too close to me" and "cutting me" sound like an oncoming car and then feeling the pain of being cut up in the collision. The narrator sees their friend "weeping" and "singing over them" and "lifting their arms up to the sky"; the friend is probably crying and try to flag down help, but the dying narrator interprets it as their friend singing and lifting up their arms to the sky. The talk about getting up at 8, making coffee and getting stoned is probably the last thing this person heard before the crash happened– the other people in the car simply making a plan for the next morning; "we'll play a record or two". If you hear the original version of this song on the 10" single there is an additional verse at the end where the narrator describes dried flowers that are hung around a home and that they are now lying above her (much like how they lie flowers on a casket), and that "they are saying I'm okay", then the refrain "I'm alone, it's cold as hell". So, essentially it's a first-person perspective of someone dying in a car accident and witnessing their own burial as they are being put into the ground. Really haunting song.
I did and always have interpreted this song as being a first-person narrative about someone's experience of dying in a car accident. "Last thing I remember.....", then the "headlights are getting too close to me" and "cutting me" sound like an oncoming car and then feeling the pain of being cut up in the collision. The narrator sees their friend "weeping" and "singing over them" and "lifting their arms up to the sky"; the friend is probably crying and try to flag down help, but the dying narrator interprets it as their friend singing and lifting up their arms to the sky. The talk about getting up at 8, making coffee and getting stoned is probably the last thing this person heard before the crash happened– the other people in the car simply making a plan for the next morning; "we'll play a record or two". If you hear the original version of this song on the 10" single there is an additional verse at the end where the narrator describes dried flowers that are hung around a home and that they are now lying above her (much like how they lie flowers on a casket), and that "they are saying I'm okay", then the refrain "I'm alone, it's cold as hell". So, essentially it's a first-person perspective of someone dying in a car accident and witnessing their own burial as they are being put into the ground. Really haunting song.