This morning I heard Luke Combs’ version of Tracy Chapman’s song ‘Fast Car.’ It was a revelation. The song starts out with the same guitar cords but then there’s a slight country twang underneath- and a man’s voice.
All of a sudden the teenagers aren’t in the inner city - they’re in a tiny town in Texas that is just as desolate and left behind. They aren’t a young couple - they’re two teenage boys. One of them has freckles - and suddenly they are my dad and his brother Mike and their friends driving across the US in a Studebaker in Jack Kerouac’s 1950s. Back to Texas and the boys are unemployed, he’s taking care of his alcoholic and violent father. In the next stanza, he’s singing about his girl who is never home while he’s working and taking care of the kids. “I was working as the checkout girl” becomes “I was working at the checkout, girl.”
Even me, driving around Taos with my friend Alicia the summer after high school when I left work early after being burned with boiling water. We sat on the hood of my 1968 Volvo on a dirt road near the gorge watching the lightning and a spectacular thunderstorm in the mountains to the east. Listening to Tracy Chapman full blast in my dorm room - over - and over - and over.
My mother and her lifetime struggle for escape velocity.
It brought home a few things to me.
Tracy Chapman’s song is a classic. The longing and the hopelessness of being stuck, that youthful freedom and desire to escape - even a youthful cynicism that it probably won’t happen. Because being young does not always mean you don’t know how the world works. And being old doesn’t mean you don’t want to escape.
It doesn’t matter if you’re a black girl in the projects, a white boy on the poor side of Canton, Texas, a freckled boy in southern Vermont who wants to play classical guitar, a 16-year-old girl in Tucson redoing the 11th grade for the 3rd time after being uprooted by her bipolar mother - a young mother or dad in the mountains of Guatemala or streets of San Salvador. A Nigerian boy on the rudder of a ship to Brazil. A Syrian mom and dad and sons and daughters crossing the mountains into Greece to get to Europe.
We can all find something in the song that speaks to us.
We are all the same.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2oHOQ8ETU3I
