A good way to start this article is by making one true statement. Hopefully it won’t be the last. And that statement is: Guys love fast cars, not to mention fast women, fast food and fast hot water in the shower. We can’t help ourselves. Put a Shelby Ford Mustang or a Corvette Stingray in the driveway, and we ask, no, demand, “Gimme the key, and not the dumb $700 key fob but one you insert into the ignition and turn 90 degrees clockwise to fire up that gorgeous, sculpted model of American ingenuity. Guys drool over laying down a strip of rubber while shifting through the 5-speed manual gearstick, coaxing that 700 horsepower V8 motor to whine with delight as the exhaust pipes rumble out let out a sigh.
That, friends, is what you do with a fast car. Then, fantasies fulfilled, guys just want to roll over and take a nap, reliving those powerful images in a daydream.
However, that is decidedly not what Tracy Chapman had in mind when she wrote her hit, ‘Fast Car.’ At least, we’re pretty sure she didn’t. You got a fast car/ We go cruising, entertain ourselves.
Almost forty years ago at age 22, Chapman wrote what would become one of her two smash hits, the other being ‘Give Me One Reason.’ She frequented coffee houses and busked on the MBTA line near Boston while attending Tufts University. One night a fellow student offered to introduce her to his father, Charles Koppelman, partner in one of the country’s largest publishing houses. Two years later after performing it at the Nelson Mandela 70th birthday tribute concert in London that featured performers such as Sting, Peter Gabriel and Whitney Houston, she had a hit single and a record deal with Elektra. Fast forward to 2023, country singer Luke Combs covered ‘Fast Car,’ winning both single of the year and song of the year at the CMA Awards. It was also nominated for a Grammy, and Chapman performed the song on stage with Combs at the awards program.
Through the decades, ‘Fast Car’ has been interpreted in several different ways and received thousands of testimonials from ordinary people whose lives were affected by it one way or another. One girl wrote a letter saying, “I can’t help but cry when I hear this song. My big brother took his own life in January and the best memories of him were listening to music and talking about our futures in his fast Ford Probe. Thank you for creating a beautiful song so I can think of my brother every time I hear it. He would’ve been screaming this song in his car if he would’ve been alive to hear it.”
Another theory is that the song is about a young girl escaping a broken household, her mother already gone, fed up with her daughter’s irresponsible alcoholic father. She escapes by finding someone with a fast car and getting out of there as fast as she can only to end up re-creating that broken household. There’s a good reason the song’s chorus goes, I remember when we were driving / I had a feeling I belonged / I had a feeling I could be someone. She sings “had” not “have.” The promise of a new start, a new life turns into lost hope. The couple have kids. He can’t hold a job and gets drunk.
Texas band Black Pumas put a R&B spin on the song. Like Chapman, singer Eric Burton was also a busker when he hooked up with guitarist Adrian Quesada in 2017. They were Grammy nominees for their first single, ‘Black Moon Rising,’ and regularly covered Chapman’s song in their live shows. “To me, ‘Fast Car’ is a song of hope, dreams and a relentless heart to go somewhere and be someone,” Burton has said.
Another supposition exists where the couple truly makes their escape, and it all works out in the end. Rod Stewart’s song ‘Young Turks’ tells a similar story. Two teenagers, one poor, the other abused, take off together, eventually having a baby and making a go of it. They held each other tight as they drove on through the night / they were so excited / We got but one shot at life / let’s take it while we’re still not afraid. Nobody’s Girl, a sort of super sister Americana group with Grace Pettis, Betty Soo and Rebecca Loebe, released the song as a single in 2018.
In an interview with “Goldmine,” Betty Soo explained, the song “drives home the inescapability of one’s circumstances, through the narrator’s recounting of the realities of her downtrodden life.” The three women harmonize splendidly in their version.
Tracy Chapman was on her way to becoming a footnote in the history of popular music, not having recorded an album for fifteen years and counting. The ironic title “Our Bright Future” (Elektra, 2008) was her last release. As the saying goes, if you want to make God laugh tell him your plans. It turned out that His plan was greater than she imagined. Along came Luke Combs and suddenly the world had opened up to refamiliarize itself with her.
Combs had been on a rapid career trajectory since his days as a bouncer and open mic singer in Boone, North Carolina. His 2019 album, “What You See Is What You Get” was the one that put him squarely in Nashville stardom. He struck while the iron was hot, releasing four more albums over five years. In 2023, he found time to record one of his favourite songs, and that pulled Chapman along with him all the way to the awards ceremonies.
Through the years, ‘Fast Car’ has meant many different things to many different people. It could be seen as a struggle to escape poverty, hope for a better future, a cautionary tale. All of those emotions filtered through as I listened to my 16-year-old granddaughter playing the song in her room on the ukulele. She wanted to learn ‘Fast Car’ after hearing me fingerpicking the tune on acoustic guitar. That means Tracy Chapman’s song has begun to reach a whole new generation that can relate to the tragedy of their life circumstances changing by way of something out of their control. I told my granddaughter that this is a song of hope, a way out from anything that’s holding you back, and to never forget you are the author of your life’s story.
