Fast Car
William Coleman
Tracy Chapman at the 2009 Cactus Festival in Bruges, Belgium.
© Hans Hillewaert
Tracy Chapman's performance of "Fast Car" at the Grammys this year moved me so much, I was caught off-guard. I've been trying to figure it out since.
I love the observations that have been made about how the shared performance was a moment of social and musical harmony we've been craving for years. I agree wholeheartedly. I confess, though, that that’s not what I felt at first. What I felt was how deeply the song pierced me, even as I could remember how deeply it pierced me when I was twenty. Like any classic, the song's relevance ages with us.
After all, the song wouldn't have social power if it didn't have such direct personal power. It sings out of us what we feel and fear so deeply that we find ourselves at our most individual; at the same time, the song reveals that we all hold those feelings and fears in common.
And the craft! I'm no expert on songwriting, but it seems to me that it's the craft that allows that power to generate: the verses take us through time, from youthful aspiration to world-weary consideration, and then, at song's end, place us in a moment of deep ambiguity; we have to make a decision. Aspire again or live that chorus only in memory? Are we old or are we young? Are we both at once? It's like the end of "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening": is the speaker about to move, or not? The possibilities exist equally.
Seeing Tracy Chapman sing the song again after all these years, with her grey hair and her child's smile, underscored these felt ideas. I saw the song embodied, and in a different way than when I saw her in 1990, as a folk seer, an old soul.
I heard once that in a lot of great songs, the chorus gains more meaning each time it returns, coming, as it does, after what we discover and feel in each verse. This is certainly true of "Fast Car," and maybe it's been true for millennia (another way the song is a unifying form of energy). This is certainly something the Greeks knew: each time the chorus returns, singing the drama's theme, the meaning is deepened and complicated by the events that, more and more, we have seen and heard (and felt) unfold.
William Coleman teaches English in a public school in New Hampshire. The co-founder of The Star-Splitter Academy, he is a former teaching fellow at Harvard, and served as managing editor of Image, and executive editor of non-fiction for DoubleTake Magazine. His poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Poetry, The Analog Sea, and other publications.