Tracy Chapman

"fast car" is pretty much a perfect song i reckon

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Monday, March 8, 2021 5:49 PM bookmarkflaglink

every time I hear Fast Car it I get emotional in a very sort of non-specific way, i can’t account for it. Those moods of hope & loss & desperation just bubbles something up inside me

with my circle of friends & outside friends & acquaintances it was always THE song that everybody sang together, guy or girl, old or young... like you just have to go for it & give it your anguished best

its an incredible song, no question

once I was going through a tough time and I heard it at Walgreens and started crying

the lyrics always get me, but she also sings it with such conviction.

that verse...

"See, my old man's got a problem
He lives with the bottle, that's the way it is
He says his body's too old for working
His body's too young to look like his"

i feel like, if you haven't had that experience before, i can't talk to you xp

also I - I had a feeling that I belonged
I had a feeling I could be someone, be someone

yeah there are so many lines that hit in the song....

once I was going through a tough time and I heard it at Walgreens and started crying

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown)

this happened to me the other day when I heard "Breakout" at CVS.

that's so weird. "Breakout" was one that I heard at Wawa during a rough period in 2017 and it had a similar effect on me. although that particular time it was the first time I'd heard it in decades!

honestly that song might be The Great American Novel

― Lily Dale, Monday, March 8, 2021 5:54 PM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

co-sign

I feel like I have a mental map of all the places I have heard "Fast Car" unexpectedly.

The first time I remember thinking, "this feels like the chorus of Fast Car," I was on a school exchange in Russia at age fifteen, and we were on a bus that was going much too fast in the dark and the snow between Novgorod and St. Petersburg, and we were all kind of joking about how we might die, and I felt overwhelmed by a sense of how much I loved everyone there and the conviction that for once in my life I was exactly where I was supposed to be. I haven't kept in touch with any of those people, of course, but I don't think that would have surprised fifteen-year-old me; inherent in thinking "This feels like Fast Car" is realizing that the feeling won't last and one day you will feel an almost unbearable nostalgia for it.

She's not a great singer or songwriter,

once I was going through a tough time and I heard it at Walgreens and started crying

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown)

this happened to me the other day when I heard "Breakout" at CVS.

― So who you gonna call? The martini police (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, March 8, 2021 7:54 PM (seventeen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

me and "that's what love is for" by amy grant. also if pharmacies played prefab sprout's "life of surprises" i would collapse in the middle of the aisle every time

where does Miami Sound Machine "Words Get in the Way" fit on the "in-store emotional reactions" scale

"Keep Ya Head Up" did this to me once, shortly after a death in the family.

the thing about this song that amazes me is that it does so many things: the actual story the song tells is clear and believable and heartbreaking and covers years of a life in a few short verses, and yet what sticks in your mind is something even more powerful, this overwhelming feeling that surges up from the chorus, of hope and clarity and loss and nostalgia, the feeling of youth and the feeling of not being young anymore, somehow encapsulated together.

be someone
be someone

I'm guessing no-one will agree there's one chorus too many?

I find the experience of listening to Fast Car so intense that I've never been able to spend enough time with it to think critically about whether there's one chorus too many or not. Every time I hear it, it just rolls over me like a tsunami of pure emotion and changes my mood for a few hours at least.

Didn't realize Neil Diamond covered "Baby Can I Hold You" contemporaneously with her first album. Schmaltzy af, but it's such a solid song.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_IwMyDq9gE

I'll usually put on "Sometimes I Rhyme Slow" after to smooth myself out.

xp

Lily Dale completely otm

there was a pop-house track a few years ago by somebody named Jonas Blue that used a sped up sample of Fast Car and it was absolutely massive. but maybe that just shows the power of the song. despite being stretched and twisted into almost unrecognizable shapes it retains this pulsating uranium core of bittersweet nostalgia and hope and loss that will long outlive whatever container happens to be carrying it that year

Enya appears on Sinead's first album!

I find the experience of listening to Fast Car so intense that I've never been able to spend enough time with it to think critically about whether there's one chorus too many or not. Every time I hear it, it just rolls over me like a tsunami of pure emotion and changes my mood for a few hours at least.

― Lily Dale, Monday, March 8, 2021 8:42 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

otm

the chorus is such a rush that it could repeat fifteen times over the course of the song and i wouldn't know. time dilates and a fast car rockets right through the dilation etc. "speed so fast felt like i was drunk" <- incredible image, followed by "the city lights lay out before us and your arm felt nice wrapped round by shoulder" <- so many touching details without ever really getting gushingly sentimental, because you're too in the moment to think anything other than "wow this person's arm feels nice"

the guitar melody is so delightfully simple and beautiful too.

the thing about this song that amazes me is that it does so many things: the actual story the song tells is clear and believable and heartbreaking and covers years of a life in a few short verses, and yet what sticks in your mind is something even more powerful, this overwhelming feeling that surges up from the chorus, of hope and clarity and loss and nostalgia, the feeling of youth and the feeling of not being young anymore, somehow encapsulated together.

― Lily Dale, Monday, March 8, 2021 10:20 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I clicked on the Tracy Chapman thread by accident, but this post made me very glad I did. 🎯

A song that comes closest to the heady queerness, also with a first-person narrator and shoulders:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmZhKlvuepI

That song's the happy ending to the "Fast Car" scenario.

kinda feel like posting chapman songs until you guys acknowledge her as one of the pivotal voice of her generation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwEphYkovtk

I thought this revive would be about the fact she got a 450k settlement from Nicki Minaj recently

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-55591957

I thought this revive would be about the fact she got a 450k settlement from Nicki Minaj recently

I think I posted this upthread, but it's a good resolution to an otherwise BULLSHIT case. I get why Chapman was angry, but it's outrageous that she was willing to go through with a lawsuit that blatantly sought a very damaging precedent, penalizing anyone for even experimenting with sampling on what are essentially private work-in-progress mixes that were never meant for release.

(rather I posted about the case when the lawsuit was filed, not the resolution)

Well, she sued after it was linked to Hot 97. A federal judge did rule that the sampling was fair use, but said a jury should decide whether Minaj was legally responsible for the leak (the settlement followed).

(“linked” = leaked)

Yeah, it's all there in the BBC link (and the Hot 97 leak in the previous link). The judge made a good call, but it doesn't always go that way. Look at the cases that basically brought an end to that golden age of sampling around the end of the '80s and start of the '90s.

I hear you. Yeah, at least there was a good judgment in this case. I think the “Blurred Lines” case was really damaging.

this has been a wonderful revive

I mean it's not exactly the first time she was sampled, Nice and Smooth is still out there on streaming so I don't think she's necessarily opposed on all counts (plus various derivatives of Sometimes I Rhyme Slow over the years)

Maybe not, but that doesn't change the language of the lawsuit. The real problem was whether they blew her off and purposely "leaked" the track rather than honoring her request - that should have been their only focus from the start. It's one thing to be pissed about that, but that doesn't excuse the broad implications of what they were suing for.

wow

Pre-fame Tracy Chapman doing "For My Lover," in 1986, holy hell
https://t.co/NXN3fzdaTC

— Jessica Hopper (@jesshopp) May 30, 2023

I am now that teacher who derails class to do an impromptu lesson on "Fast Car."

That's awesome - reminds me of my very favorite moment ever on the Simpsons:

https://preview.redd.it/have-i-ever-told-you-kids-about-the-60s-v0-u0u81zdhm9p81.jpg

"Have I ever told you kids about the '60s?"

(ah, so much for the photo)

You're not derailing--it's the one thing they'll remember. I played and talked about "Fast Car"--and Nice & Smooth---for 15 or 20 minutes with 7/8 class two years ago. I hope they remembered and winced the first time they heard that utterly pointless cover that's out there.

"baby can i hold you" hit me hard the other day

I love that so many people still love this song, but something I feel has been lost to the generations is it's not exactly unearthing a lost classic. This song was *huge* and ubiquitous back in 1988 (I was 13), and Tracy Chapman was huge. The song went top 10, she won a Grammy, etc. (and fwiw, she did it again, and even more successfully, in 1997, with "Give Me One Reason"). The Luke Combs thing is a nice coda to the story, but I didn't know the background of the song's original success:

Elektra Records released "Fast Car" on April 6, 1988, one day after the parent album, "Tracy Chapman". That June, Chapman appeared at the Nelson Mandela 70th Birthday Tribute concert, where she was initially scheduled to sing three songs. Just before surprise guest Stevie Wonder walked onstage, he learned that his keyboard's floppy disk had gone missing. He left in a panic, forcing the event organizers to usher Chapman back to the stage with nothing but a microphone and her guitar. As the organizers readied the stage for the following act, Chapman performed "Fast Car" and "Across the Lines". This performance brought attention to Chapman's music, with sales for Tracy Chapman increasing greatly, enough for it to top the Billboard 200 chart on August 27, 1988. "Fast Car" itself would reach number six on the Billboard Hot 100 the same week.

Talk about fate.

I recall that at Brown University she was voted "most likely to marry her guitar." She is all-time.

Pointless boring personal story: There was a moment in about 1989 where I was playing pool in the basement of the student commons. A woman I vaguely knew had selected "Baby Can I Hold You" on the jukebox. Her friends had left, but the song hadn't played yet. She came back in and just stood, alone in the corner, listening thoughtfully.

I never dated her or anything; we were just friends, but that moment stays with me

I love that so many people still love this song, but something I feel has been lost to the generations is it's not exactly unearthing a lost classic.

twitter was insufferable when that Luke Combs cover came out due to people in their 20's yelling that no one ever cared about the black woman who wrote and sang the original ... like, just because you weren't born yet doesn't mean the thing wasn't a massive hit, it was so omnipresent that I actually got sick of it and I love that song. Having someone cover your song and make it a hit again like 35 years later is a dream for any songwriter.