She wrote about revolution at 16; at 61 she still has the same values.
“I love the song Fast Car,” I blurted out. I was in the fifth or sixth grade, at my softball teammate’s house for a pool party. Somehow, we got to talking about music, but no one had heard of the now-famous Tracy Chapman song; it wasn’t in the Top 40.
So I sang the chorus while up to my waist in chlorinated water.
“You got a fast car/ Is it fast enough so we can fly away?”
I can’t sing. My mother once said I, “can’t carry a tune in a bucket.” That may have been why my serenade became a running joke with the team that year. “Don’t Fast Car it,” was code for, “don’t strike out.”
That wasn’t super fun as an 11 year old, but I’d been bullied before. NBD. Plus, Tracy Chapman was a hero on earth, who wrote about revolution when she was 16, who shared a stage with Nelson Mandela when she played Wembley Stadium for the South African leader’s 70th birthday in June 1988—an appearance that significantly increased her profile. She was someone I didn’t mind being made fun of for liking because I saw her as a person who spoke the truth about injustice and I wanted to have the same kind of courage. (My tormentors were probably mocking my voice more than anything, but I digress.)
Given my long-standing love and adoration for Chapman, I felt both fear and trepidation when I heard a familiar, but slightly different melody on the radio two summers ago. True confession: I listen to country music on the reg. Yes, today’s country, or pop-country, as some people call it. I’m not going to stand up for its musical integrity, but I like the story songs and the endless summer feeling. (For the record, I do NOT like the Don’t Try That in a Small Town vibes.)
When I heard those familiar notes, I leaned in and turned the radio up. And there it was, a dead-ringer cover of one of my favorite songs. The OG reigns supreme—still, Luke Combs’s version is a solid one and feels like a tribute, not a botched remake. His appreciation for the song was apparent when Combs and Chapman performed on stage together at the Grammys in 2024.
She recently spoke about it in a rare interview with The New York Times to celebrate the vinyl re-release of the album Fast Car, which dropped in early April.
“I mean, in a word, it was great,” Chapman told the Times. “It was awesome. It was a very emotional moment for so many reasons. Luke is a lovely person. Before deciding to do it, we had a good talk, and we were both on the same page about how we would approach it. That was where it all had to start.”
In the article, Chapman talks about writing Talkin’ Bout a Revolution, the first track on the Fast Car album, and how she still has the same values all these years later.
“But I think, between the 16-year-old who wrote Talkin’ Bout a Revolution and the 61-year-old sitting here with you now, that my values are the same,” she told the Times. “I still have the same concerns. I still want the same changes that I did at that time. But I certainly have a different perspective. Having grown up in the ’70s and being a beneficiary of the civil rights movement, at a time when things started to look up, I think my expectation was that we’d just keep building on that.”
My head nodded as I read her words about building on the successes of the 1970s. I thought so, too.
There’s no need to list the litany of horrible examples we’ve experienced in recent years, from the overturning of Roe v. Wade to the recent onslaught on voting rights. Not to mention the attacks on our own citizens, whether they’re war heroes or just family men trying to make it home.
The Hands Off! protests on April 5 brought hundreds of thousands to the streets in anger over these issues and more—can’t we at least agree on funding cancer research?—while Trump golfed and his club cashed in on its donors and guests. Protests can’t be heard on the green at Mar-a-Lago. (Maybe someone should start doing flyovers with slogans like “Hands Off Our Social Security” on a banner behind them?)
Things are definitively not looking up. Can we even build on the rubble that’s left? And would it be worth it? This question brought another Chapman song to mind, the title track for her 1995 album New Beginnings, that goes:
The whole world’s broke and it ain’t worth fixing
It’s time to start all over, make a new beginning
There’s too much pain, too much suffering
Let’s resolve to start all over make a new beginning
She calls for a restart, but I wonder if we even have a safe place to build. We have to clear away all the broken bits before we can get to setting down new foundations. But it’s not like there’s much of a choice.
New beginnings. That’s the revolution we need now. Yes, it seems monumental. I don’t know if we can do it, but we’re going to have to try. We need to create community, support the vulnerable, donate to nonprofits whose budgets have been stripped. We’ve got to care for ourselves and our people while we figure out what the fuck to do about this hostile government takeover.
And quickly, please. Quickly. It may seem hopeless, but we have to keep calling reps, writing letters, taking to the streets. What we’re doing now may not even be for us, but for somebody we’ll never even meet. We work now so someone in the future, hopefully, has an easier path. Or even so they can vote (or keep voting).
It’s not just one thing, one day, one march. It’s going to have to become “a constant practice,” as Chapman outlined to the Times.
“I was recently watching a documentary about [the civil rights activist] Fannie Lou Hamer, and she’s from Mississippi,” Chapman told the Times. “My grandparents are from Mississippi, and I think I hadn’t really made the connection that in the 1960s, Black people in Mississippi still didn’t have the right to vote. My grandparents left the South in the Great Migration and moved to Cleveland. I think it changed the course of their lives, but it ultimately changed the course of mine, too.
The thing that I take from it is that, now that I’m older, is that it’s this constant practice that needs to occur. A constant vigilance. You can’t expect that things will hold.”
Although she may not have named it as such, Chapman’s younger self—our younger selves—knew that real change takes time, too. It’s all there in the Fast Car lyrics, in the evolution of someone looking to fly away down the highway for a better life to that same, more mature, person who knows it’s time to stay the course and keep working to improve the life and community she already has.
And maybe say to the guy causing all the problems:
“You got a fast car
Is it fast enough so you can fly away?”
Want our stories delivered to you? Sign up for our newsletter, then follow us on Instagram, Threads, and Facebook for regular updates and a lot of other silliness.
by V.L. Hendrickson
Leslie Hendrickson is a freelance writer and editor based in New York City and Litchfield County, Connecticut. Her work has been published in The Wall Street Journal, The Hollywood Reporter, MarketWatch, The New York Times, Family Circle, ARTNews, and the late, great Jane magazine. A recent addition to the Jenny staff, Leslie serves on the steering committee of the Newburyport Literary Festival and is a graduate of Columbia’s J-School and St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is also a puppet maker, an Agatha Christie aficionado, and has completed the New York City Triathlon—which includes a dip in the Hudson River—10 times.
Leave Us a Comment