Songs can work like time capsules, shooting us through space to remember the sweet awkwardness of a first dance. Or sink us back into the free magic flowing through every vein at the party of our lives. Yet sometimes we get stuck inside that time capsule: Tracy Chapman speeds down the highway in her fast car, and Luke Combs turns out to be the little kid singing in the backseat the whole time, all grown up now.
At the Grammys in early February, they stood on the stage in simple elegance. Her matte black shirt with its three-quarter sleeves dotted at the cuff with black rhinestones, dark indigo jeans timeless and crisp. He shifted out of a trademark t-shirt and flannel for a subdued dusk dress shirt and ebony blazer, beard closely trimmed. It was as if they’d agreed: We’ll clean up for the Grammys, but we’re proud of our roots close to the earth.
Chapman brought an instantly clear vibe: comfortable with herself, no need to prove it on anyone. Her sonorous, even-toned voice grounded the room. The song she wrote in 1987 has only increased in relevance over time. The arrangement reflected this, paralleling the original 1988 release. Only the addition of a violinist, Larry Campbell, added a layer of ancient, passing time. As Chapman pulled open the chords of the song, she smiled to herself, emblematic dimples unmistakable. She looked down. Who didn’t want to know what was she thinking with that secret ebullience? This song, it’s enduring, yet still so improbable that I’m up here with this young country star? Or Yep, this song is fire? Or simply, Damn it feels good to be playing with people who love music in front of people who love music.
Whatever her considerations, she must have felt the beams of admiration coming her way from Combs, as he peered across the stage in wonder: Here I am, on stage, with this heroine. At that point, she looked up, her grin breaking wide open in response. She assuredly gathered and set the mood, in a manner named by cultural critic Daphne Brooks: “a ferociously intelligent musician, someone who will, on this day, call attention to her ability to set and change moods by way of song,” and “to strike a new mood for her audience.” Millions of people later reported feeling themselves shifted: lifted up by the sheer joy and possibility represented in the performance. Twitter. Tiktok. Instagram. Facebook. On editorial pages. Morning TV shows. Substacks. Group chats. Even Reddits. The evidence hopped up and flitted like summer lightening bugs across the short-attention-span scene: we knew the bone truth we’d lived, that Langston Hughes’ American dream is “almost dead today.” And still, we saw it flickering, in technicolor digital tape. People reported playing the performance over and over for days. I may have been one of those people.
One could — in that five minutes — remember a whole era: watching a young musician from rustbelt Cleveland write a song in 1987, perform it for Nelson Mandela’s 70th birthday in 1988, and witness a country star born thirty-odd years later in western Carolina pick it up and cover it in 2023. A song big and wide enough for all forty years of our crimped and failed hopes. The swelling desire to belong. Their duet filled the room — all our living rooms, blaring out of the TVs at pizza, kebab, and taco shops, on our headphones as we sat on buses, trains or subways – across the country. Our desire to be someone in the long era of drain-circling brokenness. Though Combs might look like he just left a MAGA rally, his profound respect for Chapman and her acceptance of his tribute could be a rallying call: we know we have to upend the divide and conquer strategy of racism, misogynoir, and homophobia if we really want to fight for the everyday person to thrive in this place.
Combs picked up his first verse: finally see what it means to be living. In microseconds, one could see Combs-the-professional, knowing he sounded that good, nodding to the audience. And then quick, darting a look to Chapman, making sure she thought so too. A shy search for approval. Noticing her slight nod and deep-smiling eyes, Combs looked down, aw shucks yes!, then turned away from her with his own cautious I’m really up here with this icon. No one could miss the stan, as he lip-synched the words all through the verses she sang. So in it.
The harmony of their voices was gorgeous, if not meteoric. But Combs’ look of rapture as they sang together is something one rarely sees. We rarely glimpse it as men look at women in public. It’s far too often absent in looks whites give to Black people. In a room in Los Angeles filled not only with stars, but with so many of the powerbrokers who for generation upon generation engaged in what Daphne Brooks has dubbed the “wholesale negation of Black women in rock and country,” Chapman and Combs became a divine manifestation of a world that could be and sometimes has been, despite our bitter history.
It is too heavy a load on this five-minute song. Too much to become a vision of other possible paths forward. Do Chapman and Combs light up a way to relate to one another in this polarized world? They might demonstrate a respect. A reciprocity.
Chapman seemed to illuminate the space she’d carved out for all the generations of Black women and queer rockers and roots-country geniuses in her wake: Lauryn Hill, Rhiannon Giddens, Valerie June, Brandi Carlisle, Rissi Palmer, Janelle Monae, Lil Nas X, Orville Peck, Amythst Kiah, and yes, even flowing into Beyoncé Country — 2016’s “Daddy Lessons” and 2024’s “Texas Hold ‘Em.” In response to Chapman’s effortless authority in the Grammy room, Taylor Swift stood up from the start, and sung along throughout (visible at 2:21 mark). It appealed to me to imagine this current popstar of the world digging back into her pricker-bush path, repping those pushed out of one genre or another by the Dogshi+t Kingpins she had to face down such as David Mueller and Scooter Braun. Swift belted along like any fan, in solidarity perhaps on a cosmic gut level, not only with Chapman, but for everyone kicked out of the country club: Loretta Lynn banned from singing “The Pill,” LL Cool J, late Dolly Parton, Aaron Neville, the Chicks post-Iraq War, Kacey Musgraves, Solange, Maren Morris — giving no f+cks. We will survive.
Back down on Figueroa Street inside the Cripto.com Arena, Chapman looked up at the 3:40 mark to see Combs’ beam of joy and respect. Her smile was low key. But she knew. Knew she is just that magnificent, and has been for a very long time. This W. Kamau Bell riff reminds us of the era in which she first emerged:
I can’t imagine what it was like to be Tracy Chapman in 1988 right before her debut album came out. The pop music of 1988 was as ‘80s as could be with George Michael, Whitney Houston, Taylor Dayne, Richard Marx, Debbie Gibson, Gloria Estefan, Natalie Cole, and RICK ASTLEY(!). Hair metal had big hair and bigger choruses with Def Leppard, Whitesnake, Poison, Guns N’ Roses, and Van Halen in its Van Hagar era. A whole bunch of rock & rollers had turned into rock & soulers — like Phil Collins, Elton John, Peter Cetera, Robert Palmer, and Huey Lewis. And while rap was definitely in the conversation, R&B was still dominating mainstream Black radio — New Edition, Al B. Sure, Pebbles, Billy Ocean, Jody Whatley, and oh yeah… MICHAEL JACKSON. And there were definitely Black musicians on the charts, dancing and singing to the beats of their own drummer — proto-Blerds like Terence Trent D’Arby, Bobby McFerrin, and Living Colour. But there was no one like Tracy Chapman. And maybe this was one of the rare times when not being like everybody else was just perfect. As much as we tell every kid to be themselves, so often in life you get rewarded for blending in. And you get shunned for being different. But “blending in” did not seem to be of interest to Tracy Chapman. Hearing “Fast Car” on the radio and seeing her in the video on MTV was revelatory and clarifying. It was like pop music cleared its collective throat of the usual synthesizers, drum machines, distorted guitars, overproduced vocals, and simple lyrics. For four minutes and twenty-six seconds you just heard a singer with something to say. It is a song that somehow captured the devastation of Reagan’s America and was also an ear worm. And she did it without using any of the MTV / pop music DayGlo tropes of the ‘80s. The level of difficulty is as high as can be.
And she came on the heels of earlier balladeers like Joni Mitchell, Roberta Flack, Sweet Honey in the Rock, and Joan Armatrading, who’s roil and rumble in the early 1980s woke me to a sound I hadn’t heard in my yacht rock parents’ house: a woman naming and owning her desire.
Back at the 2024 Grammys, at 4:27 the camera cut to Michael Trotter Jr. of The War & Treaty. In his fly key lime suit, he sang along to the feeling that I belonged, his palm flat, thumping his heart. All those years ago, Chapman penned the seemingly simple bridge: I had a feeling that I belonged. I had a feeling I could be someone. And forty years later, as she had in 1988, she drew out the “I” out over three beats and three notes. The long hold of “I-eee-I” that opened a world of promise, and tracked a past of pain. As Trotter sang along continuing to hold his heart, he stood for every human that has ever searched for slim reed of hope, as an outsider looking in, yearning to be part of something.
Trotter is young, but is no child. Nonetheless, watching the intensity with which he joined the song brought the words another misjudged GenX seer to mind: “When we scoff at the sound of our children’s keening, there’s a mirror into which we are not looking.” Trotter’s fierce joy reflected those 1993 words of Sinead O’Conner. What makes all of us, not just children, keen so fiercely for a belonging we rarely feel?
On the edge of Election 2024, Chapman & Combs seemed to sing for many, still all working as a checkout girl, hoping you’ll find work and I’ll get promoted. That we’ll move out of the shelter, buy a bigger house, live in the suburbs. They hold up a torch, showing that instead of it being the “sunset of democracy,” where we sit on the cusp of the Nazis-taking-over-the-Reichstag, it may well be the 3am-dark-before-dawn that voting rights genius Nsé Ufot and SNCC Legacy Project Chair Courtland Cox reframe for the country here: “The truth of the matter is that we’ve never experienced actual democracy. Our current darkness “is not dusk, it’s dawn. It’s the birthing. This is new. It’s 3 o’clock in the morning. And we are heading into what full participatory democracy could look like. It’s not dark because the lights are being turned out. It’s dark because the lights are being turned on.”
And Combs wasn’t done with reciprocal respect model for our future-possible. As the five-minute tune wound down, he pivoted his full body, both feet, toward Chapman. His hands in the air, he swept down in her direction three times — an homage to her song, her musicianship, her unpretentious badassery. He invited us all to not just sing along, but pay our long overdue respects. In a country that rarely honors its non-white, non-male, non-straight ancestors, this gesture scintillated.
As everyone but the top 10% has simply been driving in circles, or fallen off the ever-closer cliff since Fast Car’s first Reagan Era appearance — here Combs was, the Current Man of Country Music, acknowledging her foresight. Her lyrical prowess. The canny pacing of her hook, echoing through every dehumanizing minute of an endless bullshit job. The absence of good schools. Bulldozed public swimming pools. Parks where people are no longer paid a livable wage to tend the flowers and playgrounds. Later Combs wrote on Instagram: When it comes to the performance it’s still hard to process how amazing it really was to be up there on that stage. No doubt a defining moment of my career. Tracy, I want to send my sincerest thanks to you for allowing me to be a part of your moment. Thank you for the impact you have had on my musical journey, and the musical journeys of countless other singers, songwriters, musicians, and fans alike. I hope you felt how much you mean to the world that night. We were all in awe of you up there and I was just the guy lucky enough to have the best seat in the house.
Chapman faced him, hand on heart, and bowed once back, then to the audience. She smiled at Combs. True to her Laura Duncan/Woody Guthrie roots, she didn’t follow the performance into the glitter and glut of the Grammy afterparties. She set down her guitar, and walked back out into the night.
We may be stuck in the time capsule still, but Chapman and Combs turned on the lights for a short five minutes, revealing the outline of paths onward. This is what 3am dark looks like.