(The) Harvey Danger Database

(Theme from) Carjack Fever

Recorded

Release history

Credits

Alternate versions

Lyrics

There’s a bright white light
To shine shine on all the dim bulbs
in the crowd tonight
And there’s a thin yellow line to separate the fast lane

And there’s a man I know
he’ll take apart your engine if you ask him right
Let’s empty all the minibars and leave this town in flames1

He’s starving for attention
She is swallowing her pride
Bitter gall for bleeding ulcers
attitudes you can’t abide
A sentence fragment city
a poor excuse for a life of crime
This is not a road picture, we are not amused
(or surprised)

You don’t need a passport to know what state you’re in

She wore barrettes of many colors
in her many-colored hair
That’s not the point—
they only notice what you wear
She said, “the moon is a toenail, the stars are a guardrail,
my heart is a sandpail… and you’re Toluca Lake.”

Stop the traffic! Bend the time!
We’re heading into territory
Too ugly to explore
(but they’ve both been there before)
He quotes Nathanael West
She tries her best, but can’t find a mouth to grin with
’cause a tragedy requires a little greatness
to begin with…

You are ill wind, you blow no good
a pissant under glass, an airport neighborhood
earthquake survivor2
feral youngsters smoking tea
Spit in your hands and see you splinter every—
(I saw the secret Sharon Tate3 films)
tree

Culver City!
Beachwood Drive!
Vesper Avenue!4

The needle on the radiator rising as the road inclines
The scene is going nowhere fast;
he’s shooting highway signs
She carves her sorry epitaph, a carjack fever scrawl:
“If you only live in movies maybe you don’t really live at all”

You don’t need a passport
to know what state you’re in
To know what state you’re in
To know what state you’re—

  1. Nathanael West’s 1939 novel The Day of the Locust features a painting called “The Burning of Los Angeles”. ↩

  2. Footnote #19 in the KJV CD liner notes: The last time I saw Phyllis, she exploded. (In the 1959 black comedy A Bucket of Blood, John Shaner’s character claims to have once seen a statue called “The Third Time Phyllis Saw Me, She Exploded.”) ↩

  3. Sharon Tate was an actress murdered by Charles Manson’s “Family” in 1969. ↩

  4. All locations in and around L.A. (as is Toluca Lake). ↩

Quotes

ECS: I think that song, to me, illustrates one of the things that I like best about the possibilities of our band, that is, to smash a couple of pop forms that we really like against each other until they hopefully create a different thing.

— The Rocket,

SCN: “Carjack” was an attempt to write aggressively noisy, new wave rock; song dates back to ’96 (radically different version), but wasn’t finished till Bearsville, where the quiet, pretty part that precedes each chorus arrived at the eleventh hour in a jubilant, birth-like moment, allowing the words to become a more cinematic narrative, like a three-minute road film; can’t decide about the moon is a toenail, but I think I’m ok with it; screamed parts over the bass solo are all places I lived as a kid; good screaming.10A

ECS: The album version of “Carjack Fever” was, I think, the last song we recorded. John and I filled my snare drum with pocket change. Sean played his Cru-Mar organ to death, and I still miss that thing’s sound. The feedback feels wild and we wrote the new “choruses” right there in the studio. It sounds to me like we’d finally figured out something we’d been missing for months—something about looseness.10A

SCN: I remember the session in Bearsville kind of breaking down (was it because of me? wouldn’t be the first time!) and Jeff and Aaron dreaming up this whole new bit, a gentler, but no less anxious counterpart to the speedy, nervy chaos of the existing song. And it was exactly what the doctor ordered: the real ending of our most unfinished song. We all performed the fantastic surgery to make it fit, and then all I had to do was write way more lyrics! But those came quickly, as I recall. And they’re pretty much my favorite lines on the whole of KJV.25B

Notes

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