Pick a Bruce song completely at random and there's a good chance you'll run into a car reference somewhere in the lyrics. Those references are often used in service of the subtext of the song. The rolled down window in Thunder Road to show escape. The Stolen Car on a pitch black night signifying despair. The front seat of the big old Buick in My Hometown serving as a sacred space for fathers and sons.

Then there are the car references that are more primal, more carnal.
"Come on baby take a seat on my fender"
"She's straddling the shifter in my front seat"
"You ain't lived 'til you've had your tires rotated by a red headed woman"
And of course, every line in Pink Cadillac.

But today we're dealing with an even smaller subset of the primal car lyrics: the personal primal. A self-driving car, if you will.

Stuck inside of Ramrod, which is as on the nose as Pink Cadillac is when it comes to Songs About Cars That Are Actually About Sex, is this line about what one might do when one doesn't have a partner to ride shotgun. When the only option is manual transmission. Yes, there's a literal reading: a car on the starting line for a race, the narrator thinking of his girl when he steps on the gas. But let's not kid ourselves.

I'm not going to pretend this lyrics is some stroke of genius, but I like it. Line and unwind don't actually rhyme, but they do in the delivery. You can feel how it's drawn out just enough to evoke the feeling of release. "I swear" doesn't need to be included, but it's there to help the lengthen the cadence. We get fifteen one-syllable words in a row, building up some potential energy, then "pretty" comes in and acts as a climax before another set of five one-syllable words lead to the final unwinding.

P.S. Ramrod is a necessary buffer on the back half of Disc 2 of The River, but it's one of the main events here.