Every Song I Love — 3. Tracy Chapman: Fast Car
Music was the first thing in my life that made me comfortable expressing my emotions. At my dad’s funeral, it was the music that ultimate set my tears flowing. The same was true at my own wedding, although they were tears of joy in that case. It’s as if the music reaches inside of me, and opens up a place that instinct tells me to keep tightly shut. Like many men, I still sometimes struggle to express my emotions, but the fact I can at all is at least partially because of music.
When you’re a small child, music is less complicated, something fun to leap about to, it doesn’t make you feel all these feelings, until, at some point, it does. The first song that ever had this effect on me was Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car. It was back in the late 1980s. My parents had split up a couple of years earlier, and we had moved out of what had been the family home. I have a memory of my mum decorating our new home, whilst listening to the first Tracy Chapman album on a cheap cassette player. The memory sticks with me partly because she rarely actively listened to music at that time. I doubt I even realised she was a music lover. Trying to bring up two children solo whilst also putting yourself through University doesn’t leave a lot of time for your own pleasures.
I don’t think I even understood at that time what that moment, that music, was making me feel. Even now I struggle to fully describe it. Some sadness yes, maybe also a little regret, but mostly defiance. A kind of “fuck you, world you’ve done your worst and I’m still here”. I wonder if that was what my mum was feeling, or whether these are just my own projections.
Fast Car has always taken me back to that particular instant in time, and consequently I’ve found it weirdly difficult to listen to in the years since. It wasn’t even a sad moment, necessarily, but the feelings the song evokes are just so intense, even 30+ years on that it’s hard to just put on casually. Even now, listening while writing this, I’m a little emotional.
Part of it is the memory, but part of it is just that it’s a brilliant song. I’m not sure I can think of a song more atmospheric. Within seconds, those opening chords have drawn you into its world. And that voice, unlike any other I’d heard before, so deep and rich and full of character. People talk about Springsteen being cinematic, but really he’s got nothing on this.
Chapman’s career never maintained its heights after that phenomenally successful debut album. She clearly wasn’t comfortable in the public eye, and as a black, gay woman in an even more racist, homophobic time than now, it’s easy to understand why. Her songs, and Fast Car in particular, have lived on though . Fast Car, for some reason, seems to exist in some kind weird middle-of-the-road Radio 2 world (the two songs my streaming service suggested after listening to it were Ed Sheeran and Michael Buble), and as such is perhaps a weird fit with the other music I listen to and write about, but the song is so much better than that would suggest.
I’m not sure Chapman will ever quite get the recognition she deserves, although the massive US country chart number 1 hit cover of Fast Car by Luke McComb did bring her back to prominence and led to some re-evaluation of her life and career. I don’t love the cover as much as the original (how could I?), as it can’t quite capture the same feeling or atmosphere. But anything that brings Fast Car to prominence, that makes people go back and listen to the original, and just maybe evoke the feelings it evoked in the young me has got to be a good thing.
Originally published at http://markjwray.com on February 6, 2024.
