‘Fast Car’ is the country song we didn’t know we had

Plus, reviews of essential and evocative new albums from Janelle Monáe, Jenny Lewis, Aja Monet and Amaarae.

View this email online June 10, 2023 by Stephen Thompson This week, we look at Luke Combs’ remake of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car”; plus, we’ve got reviews of new albums from Janelle Monáe, Jenny Lewis, Aja Monet and Amaarae. Photo by Jason Kempin/Getty Images As a small-town kid in the 1980s, I fell in love with music via MTV and the ritual of transcribing the American Top 40 every Sunday. But I was just out of range of the nearest college radio station, and the grocery store where I worked as a stock boy played only country, so it took a while for me to be struck by two vastly different musical revelations. The first came courtesy of the aforementioned grocery store, where my attitude toward country music evolved from haughty resentment to deep appreciation and love. Lyle Lovett, Steve Earle, Dwight Yoakam, Patty Loveless, Randy Travis, Rosanne Cash, Skip Ewing, k.d. lang, Keith Whitley, Michael Johnson… one by one, they’d transform in my mind from curiosities to discoveries to favorites. Sure, I’d recoil at the revanchism of a song like Hank Williams Jr.’s “If the South Woulda Won,” but the country hits of the late ’80s were just as often forward-looking, especially sonically: Steve Earle dropped bagpipes into the hard-bitten Southern-rock epic “Copperhead Road,” Lyle Lovett worked heart and humor into the wry ruminations of “If I Had a Boat,” Patty Loveless presided over a two-and-a-half-minute folk-pop masterpiece in “Timber, I’m Falling in Love,” and on and on. Those songs were, and are, perfect. Stop reading this and listen to them, right now! I’ll wait. The other revelation came via the Top 40, in 1988, when I first heard Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car.” It’s hard to overstate the greatness of “Fast Car”: the inquisitive guitar hook, the deep well of empathy, the restraint that allows a few words (“He says his body’s too old for working / His body’s too young to look like his”) to write chapters of their own. “Fast Car” takes a simple, Springsteenian plea for escape — “You got a fast car / I want a ticket to anywhere” — and uses it as a jumping-off point for a life’s story. Chapman’s narrator seeks anything but the life she has, seizes an opportunity and makes a go of it, only to find herself a breadwinner whose job “in the market as a checkout girl” isn’t enough to keep her out of a shelter. As her situation improves, her needs and ambitions evolve with it: Now paying the bills herself, she sums up the state of her relationship in a few evocative words (“You stay out drinking late at the bar / See more of your friends than you do of your kids”) and seeks a fresh escape. In four minutes, she’s crafted a novel’s worth of storytelling — about desperation and ambition, about subsistence and striving, about the way hope can curdle into disappointment before blooming into a fresh call to action. “Fast Car” knocked me flat in 1988, and it still knocks me flat today, every time. You can only imagine how much it stood out on Top 40 radio in between, say, “Wild, Wild West” and “Kokomo.” I used some of my grocery-store earnings to buy Chapman’s self-titled debut the second I laid eyes on it, brought it home and blasted it on the turntable in my bedroom. Soon, my dad was pounding on my door. I turned down the sound and shouted an apology, only to hear his voice from the hallway: “This is incredible. Who is this?” Dad had been a music reviewer himself, years earlier — he loved to brag that The Cleveland Press’s readers criticized him for saying that Bob Dylan would be the next Woody Guthrie — so I felt like a true tastemaker, maybe for the first time ever. *** I’ll confess to having mostly tuned out of country radio in the years since, sometime after Garth Brooks — whom I loved instantly and still adore — helped transform the genre into what felt like a homogenous, stadium-friendly juggernaut. Over the years, I’d come to despair at what felt like an endless sea of country dudes with two first names, singing about Friday nights, the male gaze and paeans to living in the smallest possible world. I’d find a winner here and there along the way — including Hank Williams Jr.’s daughter Holly Williams, who really needs to put out another record someday — but rarely celebrated country radio as the den of discovery it used to be. Then, a month or so ago, my partner and I were flipping stations during a drive, landed on a country station and heard the opening strains of “Fast Car,” as performed by Luke Combs. We did a bit of hand-fighting over rights to the dial, as my curiosity butted up against her fury at the audacity of a white guy trying to turn “Fast Car” into a country song. We listened, and … damned if Combs doesn’t pull it off. He even passed the test I’d set for him the minute I decided to listen: He didn’t change the words in the line, “Now I work in the market as a checkout girl.” Didn’t change the job, didn’t change “girl” into a gender-neutral monosyllable like “clerk,” just sang the words as written. What I heard in Combs’s cover, and what I keep experiencing as I’ve revisited it in the weeks since, is my own personal perfect storm of nostalgia — for a moment when country music opened my mind, and when a sheltered kid in Iola, Wis., learned that there are Americans out there who seize their opportunities, work hard and still live in shelters. The plainspoken chorus — “I remember when we were driving / Driving in your car / Speed so fast, it felt like I was drunk / City lights lay out before us / And your arm felt nice wrapped ’round my shoulder” — felt then like a perfect, universal encapsulation of youth: a headrush of opportunity, joy, escape, connection. I feel that same mix of sensations listening to Combs, coupled with the sense of kinship that comes with knowing that someone else out there grew up with the song and came out feeling the same way. Accompanying that kinship is a sense of hope — hope for a world with fewer boundaries and binaries and roped-in genres, where a North Carolina kid like Combs could grow up listening to Tracy Chapman and experience her as a gateway to telling truths about humanity and the world. It’s not just a collective rediscovery of “Fast Car” that thrills me. It’s the idea that somewhere, another small-town kid is turning on country radio in 2023 and experiencing the same world-expanding cocktail of wonder and discovery that I did. Newsletter continues after sponsor message More to read, watch and hear In a week full of intriguing releases, Ann Powers covered Janelle Monáe’s long-awaited The Age of Pleasure, Marissa Lorusso reviewed Jenny Lewis’ easygoing Joy’All, Sheldon Pearce wrote up the blues poet and activist Aja Monet’s debut album, when the poems do what they do, and Tarisai Ngangura raved about Ghanaian-American singer-songwriter Amaarae and her new album Fountain Baby. To know my brilliant colleague Hazel Cills is to hear about HBO’s troubled melodrama The Idol for the first time and think, “I want to talk to Hazel about this.” The show premiered Sunday and Hazel has thoughts, so you’re in for a treat. Speaking of treats, the great Americana singer-songwriter Jason Isbell just dropped a new album called Weathervanes, and KXT in Dallas has video footage of him performing “Cast Iron Skillet.” Podcast roundup! All Songs Considered returned this week with a new installment of Viking’s Choice, in which Lars Gotrich joined Bob Boilen to play adventurous new songs from Dorotheo, Fatoumata Diawara, High Rise, Anjimile, Laure Boer and SOLE. On Alt.Latino, hosts Felix Contreras and Anamaria Sayre rounded up new music by Zuco 103, Santa Fe Klan, Gotopo, Claire Delic, Mangos Herrera, Léton Pé and Cabra. And on New Music Friday, a distinguished panel (and Robin Hilton) discussed the latest by Amaare, King Krule, Jenny Lewis, Janelle Monáe and Keaton Henson. NPR Music reporter Anastasia Tsioulcas reports on Robert Beaser, former head of the composition faculty at The Juilliard School, who was fired Thursday after an independent investigation of allegations of sexual harassment and misconduct.  As part of her video interview series Amplify, Lara Downes sat down with pianist Gerald Clayton to discuss his music’s mix of tradition and innovation.  Odds are pretty decent that at some point in your life, you’ve studied or relaxed to the gentle, best-selling piano music of George Winston. Winston died June 4. He was 73. Tiny Desk Zayrha Rodriguez/NPR Charlie Wilson’s career has spanned more than 50 years — as a member of The Gap Band, a Grammy-winning solo singer and a go-to voice in hip-hop, where he’s turned up on recordings by Snoop Dogg, Kanye West, Nas and others. But he’s also hit serious lows: "I went from rags to riches, riches to rags, then rags to the curb, the curb to homeless," he said at the Tiny Desk. So his full-band performance doubled as a magical 30-minute victory lap, recorded as part of our award-winning Black Music Month celebration. Also this week: Speaking of 30-minute victory laps, the Tiny Desk also hosted a supersized showcase for Grammy-festooned R&B superstar Babyface, who’s joined on vocals by Tank, Chanté Moore and Avery Wilson. One More Thing Luke Combs performs “Fast Car” solo, on an acoustic guitar, in 2020. Listen to your local NPR station. Visit NPR.org to hear live radio from WUFT 89.1 (edit station). Need a new playlist? Follow NPR Music on Spotify and Apple Music What do you think of today's email? We'd love to hear your thoughts, questions and feedback: nprmusic@npr.org Enjoying this newsletter? Forward to a friend! They can sign up here. Looking for more great content? Check out all of our newsletter offerings — including Books, Pop Culture, Health and more! You received this message because you're subscribed to NPR Music emails. 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