Fast Cars and Thoughtful Moments

Like many of you, I watched the Tracy Chapman / Luke Combs duet of Fast Car from the Grammys last night and was powerfully and unexpectedly moved. Also, like many of you, I remember vividly how that song — and that artist — stood out in the spring of 1988, when the radio was blasting INXS, George Michael, and Terence Trent D’arby in a never-ending, power-pop loop.

She was just so different. So human and real.

Tracy Chapman’s voice and talent felt — then, and again last night — like a marble-smooth boulder somehow preexisting the river itself. There was all this stuff — all these gated drum tracks, borderline erotic videos, pyrotechnics — and then, suddenly . . . a lady with a voice and an acoustic guitar. She shut us all up for a minute, sort of a collectively stunned silence of truly listening before, inevitably, we were back into the radio roll of Rick Astley, Poison, and Bobby Brown.

For all her understated, graceful humility, she left a deeper mark than those acts. One that made hearing her sing again last night more than a bit of nostalgia. It felt, instead, like an escape from temporality itself — a sudden relocation to a space of truth, beauty, and light.