#80, “Fast Car,” Tracy Chapman (1988)

150 Favorite Songs: #80, “Fast Car,” Tracy Chapman (1988)

There are some songs that, while not exactly dated, feel very much like the product of a different time. I guess the nice way of putting it is to say that they don’t make ‘em like that anymore. “Be My Baby” is a perfect song, but if it had been released today, I don’t know that it would find its audience, just because it’s so unlike the sort of songs that become hits today.

If you’d asked me a year ago to name another perfect song that belongs to a time when very different kinds of songs were capable of becoming hits, I’d have named “Fast Car.” Then, of course, Luke Combs covered it, took it to the top of the Top 40 chart, broke airplay records on country radio, went double-platinum with it, and performed it at the Grammys, alongside Tracy Chapman, to rapturous applause. Shows what I know.

There’s a timelessness to “Fast Car” that I think I underestimated. It’s such a powerful, singular statement of understanding and empathy, so fully human in the way Tracy Chapman writes, sings, and plays it, that it connects across decades. It connects whether it’s Chapman herself singing it or if it’s Luke Combs doing what is essentially a very nice version of Tracy Chapman karaoke. The vignettes Chapman sketches in the verses—of people experiencing the sort of very real struggles that make fantasizing about getting in a fast car and going somewhere new, to start over—are all so authentic and lived-in that it doesn’t take much adornment for them to hit. And the way she plays it (which Combs was wise to emulate in his version), feels very organic. You can hear fingers sliding across string to build those iconic notes, can hear just enough reverb on her voice to feel like you’re in a small room with her. It’s just so powerfully, painfully intimate.

There’s a certain type of song that’s so meaningful in its moment that it sort of becomes a genre unto itself, where other artists can hear it and start working in that genre themselves. “All Too Well” is sort of Taylor Swift taking her own spin on “Desolation Row”; “Lose Yourself” is Eminem doing “Eye of the Tiger.” I think maybe “Fast Car” sounded like it belonged to another era to me because it meant so much that we’ve had other artists try to build off its archetype. “Runaway Train” by Soul Asylum is a “Fast Car,” in its own way. So is “What It’s Like” by Everlast, or even “1-800-273-8255” by Logic—all of them these warm and humane songs written from the perspective of people in impossibly hard situations, performed with deep compassion and recorded with an uncommon level of intimacy.

I suppose, when you think about it, the fact that those things don’t actually go out of style—regardless of how they’re interpreted across genres, to say nothing of race and gender—is important too. “Fast Car” is one of the finest exercises in empathy to ever become a massive hit song. The fact that it was able to do so again even in our current, incredibly bleak, moment gives me a little bit of hope. I didn’t know we had it in us, but I’m grateful that Tracy Chapman gave us the song as a marker to identify that we do.