Driving in Circles

The generational longing of "Fast Car"

In the late 1980s, my father drove my sister and me to school. He had a maroon Toyota Camry. When he sold it to my uncle, we named it Doc: “Daddy’s Old Car”. We liked it when my uncle brought Doc over, because the car revived old memories. My favorite memories were of songs.

Doc was not a fast car, and the drive to school was perfunctory — for my father, at least. For me, it was a musical adventure.

My dad would pop in a cassette, unconcerned with the audience of small children in the backseat. He was in his 30s, which seemed very old at the time, but which I realize now is shockingly young — young enough to still buy new music.

He had a rotation: Neil Young’s This Note’s For You; Roy Orbison’s Mystery Girl and A Black and White Night; The Traveling Wilburys Vol. 1, after Congress passed the Buying Only Old Music Everyone Remembers (BOOMER) Act requiring all dads own that album; U2’s The Joshua Tree.

And Tracy Chapman’s self-titled 1988 debut, with the quietly devastating “Fast Car.”

I have been startled to see how many people were introduced to “Fast Car” the same way I was: by their fathers playing it as they drove. This is how country artist Luke Combs, who covered “Fast Car” and performed a reverent Grammys duet with Chapman, discovered it too.

In the late 20^th century, American dads played a Black female folk singer’s poignant anthem of a dead American Dream, and their children took note.

My dad wasn’t trying to teach me anything with “Fast Car”. He just liked Tracy Chapman.

But I listened, wide-eyed, as it described the country I was learning to fear to love.

“Fast Car” is not a relic of its time but tragically timeless. Combs’ cover could stay faithful because nothing in this country got better. That “Fast Car” can be passed down through generations without requiring explanation is both a songwriting triumph and a grim indictment of America.

A song about Reagan-era struggle became a song about 21^st-century survival. When my teenage children hear “Fast Car”, they do not wonder why the narrator cannot escape poverty or why a person with a job still has to live in a shelter. Those things happen all the time.

What shocked them was that, once upon a time, the nation sang along.

I was so overwhelmed watching Chapman perform that I burst into tears. When the song ended, I stopped watching the show, unable to think or function, only feel.

Even now I struggle to write, but I am writing about this, since I can’t concentrate on much else.

Because with one note it’s 1988 again: fall breeze through rolled-down windows, little backpack on my lap, my father’s face in the rearview mirror, a deep voice proclaiming from the speakers that she had a feeling she could be someone. My disappointment when the searing chorus hits just as we get to school, and I have to go, and my father pulls away.

I remember when we were driving, driving in your car.

*          *          *

“America needed this,” commentators said, referring not only to the mastery of the duet, but to its crossover appeal in a hateful time, and this is true.

“Tracy Chapman deserved this,” commentators said, referring to the standing ovation she received, and this is true, too. Chapman looked luminous in an almost literal way — her face glowing like the moon, her voice deep and ageless as the tides. She was the force I had discovered as a child, when I marveled how she wrote lyrics brutal and beautiful at once.

America deserves this, I thought to myself. We deserved to have our pain acknowledged, and that is what Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs did. Americans were crying in relief — and with nostalgia for when recognition of pain was an ordinary act.

Times were never easy — the endurance of “Fast Car” proves that — but people were not always so publicly derisive of those suffering, and music was often an avenue of empathy.

“Fast Car” was one of many political songs to emerge in what I call An Anomalous Era of American Accountability, a fleeting time in which problems are confronted and the public demands change. They occur every couple of decades.

I describe this era, and its music, in my book They Knew:

We exited the most recent Anomalous Era of American Accountability in 2021, around the time I wrote that passage, and returned to the Dark Times of American Impunity.

But unlike in the late 1980s, we lack a national soundtrack to our pain.

The music industry has been dying since the advent of digital media. But now the destruction seems purposeful: top-down, vengeful, intended to destroy music’s political power. The 1980s and 1990s songs I describe would never be sanctioned by executives or travel so widely. We would never be allowed such cohesive outrage.

That is why it was so reassuring to see Chapman reemerge on stage. She still sang, we still listened — and she had passed the torch while remaining the source of its light.

Combs no longer sang by himself. We didn’t sing by ourselves either. It was such an unfamiliar sensation, this sense of possibility: that you could be someone, be someone.

And not be someone alone.

*          *          *

I was nine when “Fast Car” came out. I was forty-four when I visited my parents’ house and stole my dad’s Tracy Chapman cassette.

I took it home to St. Louis and listened to it with my Walkman by the public pool, my sunglasses hiding my tears. I stole his Roy Orbison cassettes too, even though I already owned that music in other forms. I wanted to remember what it was like to be nine, hearing a great song for the first time with my dad.

Sometimes you can say a lot without saying much at all. Sometimes a singer says it for you. Sometimes the most mundane actions have a lasting effect.

My family broke up the sixteen-hour drive back from my parents’ house at a sports bar near Cleveland. We were eating dinner when the Luke Combs cover of “Fast Car” came on. Customers began to sing along, and so did I, pleased with this new version, excited by the spontaneous comradery.

There were couples in their 30s and 40s, some with small children. I wondered if their dads had introduced them to “Fast Car” too. I wondered if they were struggling, if this restaurant was a special night out.

I wondered what they expected out of life as 1980s and 1990s kids. What it meant to be raised on a song that told us to not expect much from America, but whose narrator dreamed of more, because she could not help it — no matter how much it hurt.

And then, suddenly, “Fast Car” stopped. We were all too shocked to say anything. By the time a televised game broke the silence, it felt wrong to complain. The moment had passed. The song was over.

But it wasn’t really over. There was just a delay.

Today Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” is a hit again. I texted a video of the performance to my dad, who has not watched the Grammys since the 1980s, if ever. My children are listening to it with me, and my husband is playing it on the guitar.

I know we will sing “Fast Car” as a family. I know we will sound absolutely terrible, and that decades from now my kids will remember when they used to sing “Fast Car” with their dad — and their mom.

And that maybe, it’ll mean more than they knew, the way it did for me.

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My dad’s Tracy Chapman tape from 1988

Remember liner notes? As a kid, I used to analyze every word.