Lyrics to
Fire On The Mountain

This version of Fire On The Mountain was released by Grateful Dead in 1978.

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Long distance runner, what you standin’ there for?
Get up, get out, get out of the door
Your playin’ cold music on the barroom floor
Drowned in your laughter and dead to the core.
There’s a dragon with matches that’s loose on the town
Takes a whole pail of water just to cool him down.

Fire! Fire on the mountain!

Almost ablaze still you don’t feel the heat
It takes all you got just to stay on the beat.
You say it’s a livin’, we all gotta eat
But you’re here alone, there’s no one to compete.
If Mercy’s a bus’ness, I wish it for you
More than just ashes when your dreams come true.

Fire! Fire on the mountain!

Long distance runner, what you holdin’ out for?
Caught in slow motion in a dash for the door.
The flame from your stage has now spread to the floor
You gave all you had. Why you wanna give more?
The more that you give, the more it will take
To the thin line beyond which you really can’t fake.

Fire! Fire on the mountain!

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Grateful Dead has released many songs over the years besides Fire On The Mountain. Grateful Dead released songs from 1967 to 1989 spanning across albums like The Grateful Dead, Anthem Of The Sun, Live / Dead, Aoxomoxoa, American Beauty, Workingman's Dead, Grateful Dead (Skull & Roses), Europe '72, History Of The Grateful Dead, Vol. 1 (Bear's Choice), Wake Of The Flood, Grateful Dead From The Mars Hotel, Blues For Allah, Steal Your Face, Terrapin Station, Shakedown Street, Go To Heaven, Reckoning, In The Dark, and Built To Last. Decade Lyrics has over lyrics & songs by Grateful Dead.

If you're a fan of lyrics from 1970s songs looking for more songs from 1978 or the 1970s overall, you've come to the right place!

About Lyrics and Fire On The Mountain by Grateful Dead

The lyrics to Fire On The Mountain are just the words, phrases, verses and chorus that Grateful Dead used when the song was created in 1978. The lyrics to Fire On The Mountain have both easy-to-spot meanings and hidden metaphors that have been discussed by the music press and fans, but only Grateful Dead and any collaborators know all of the inspirations for the song.

If you like etymology or breaking apart phrases and words, it is easy to understand the lyrics to Fire On The Mountain by Grateful Dead. The word "lyric" itself derives from the Latin word lyricus, with the actual English word lyrics applied to the definition "words set to music" listed in Stainer and Barrett's 1876 Dictionary of Musical Terms. Continuing the chain, the Latin word lyricus derives from the Greek word λυρικός or lyrikós. This somewhat means "poetry accompanied by the lyre" or "words set to music." You can easily see that by looking at the background of the word lyric, that the "lyrics to Fire On The Mountain" means the words set to the music of Fire On The Mountain, or poetry accompanied by the lyre played by Grateful Dead. The singular form "lyric" is still used to mean the complete words to a song. However, the singular form lyric is also commonly used to refer to a specific line (or phrase) within a song's lyrics. Hence, by this analysis of word structure, you could say that the lyric to Fire On The Mountain and the lyrics to Fire On The Mountain are both one and the same thing. None of this talk about the word Lyrics is really relevant to fans of Grateful Dead who came here looking just for the lyrics to Fire On The Mountain, but we feel it is still fun to learn what's behind commonly used words and lyrics in songs.

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