"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. 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.
The other revelation came via the Top 40, in 1988, when I first heard Tracy Chapman's " Fast Car." Stop reading this and listen to them, right now! I'll wait. 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. one by one, they'd transform in my mind from curiosities to discoveries to favorites. Lyle Lovett, Steve Earle, Dwight Yoakam, Patty Loveless, Randy Travis, Rosanne Cash, Skip Ewing, k.d. The first came courtesy of the aforementioned grocery store, where my attitude toward country music evolved from haughty resentment to deep appreciation and love.
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. Subscribe to the newsletter here.Īs 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. This essay originally appeared in NPR Music's weekly newsletter.
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