What made Sunday night’s performance feel different wasn’t just the time that had passed, or the gray hair that now elegantly frames Chapman’s face. It was the presence of Combs, born a year after that Grammy performance, regarding Chapman with an awe-struck reverence. He seemed to be a stand-in for the many, many people over the years — of all races, genders and generations — who have heard their deepest desires reflected in this song and wished to pay Chapman their gratitude.
They traded a few lines and harmonized beautifully on the chorus — her tone opalescent, his bringing some grit — but Combs never overshadowed Chapman. He knew that in that moment, no one could. Something about the way he looked at her said it all: His eyes shone with irrepressible respect. Here was a grown man, an assured performer who sells out stadiums, visibly trembling before the sight and the sound of the folk singer Tracy Chapman.
When a cover of a famous song becomes a hit decades after the original was released, it usually requires a stylistic reboot to resonate with a new generation. But the appeal of Combs’s version, which reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100, came from how closely it hewed to Chapman’s recording. Combs gave the rhythm section a little more arena-rock oomph and added a slight country twang to his phrasing, but that’s really it. It’s a cliché to call a song “timeless,” but here was proof: “Fast Car” did not need any major souping-up to become a hit once again, more than three decades after it was first released.
Still, this resurgence, and the success of Combs’s recording, sparked a debate about the song’s proper genre. Combs was born in North Carolina and eventually moved to Nashville to start his music career, and all of the music he’d released before “Fast Car” had been classified, for chart purposes, as country. That meant that when “Fast Car” won song of the year at the Country Music Association Awards last November, Chapman became the first Black songwriter to win that prize. This felt less like a cause for celebration than a stark reminder of how few Black women get to be considered “country” artists — a genre with a long, complicated racial history. Was “Fast Car” a pop song, as the Grammys had classified it in 1989? Was it a folk song when a Black woman sang it, and a country song only when a white man did?
But the culture wars that divide us so deeply elsewhere seemed, perhaps fleetingly, far away Sunday night.
The song, during Chapman and Combs’s five-minute performance, felt incredibly spacious — larger than the limitations of genre, welcoming and expansive enough to hold every single person it had ever touched, regardless of the markers of identity that so often divide us. It was a rare reminder of music’s unique ability to obliterate external differences. “Fast Car” is about something more internal and universal. It is a song about the wants and needs that make us human: the desire to be happy, to be loved, to be free. Lindsey Zoladz
Joni Mitchell, 80, has been singing her prismatic folk ballad “Both Sides Now” since she was 23, and yet every time she performs it, she seems to be interpreting its infinitely wise lyrics anew. The rendition she performed at the Grammys — her first-ever performance on the award show, which makes sense given how underestimated and slighted by the industry Mitchell has felt throughout most of her career — was at once elegiac and nimble, backed by a loose jazz arrangement that allowed her to riff on its familiar melody. Showing off a resonant tone and impressive range that she has worked diligently to strengthen since suffering an aneurysm in 2015, Mitchell’s performance was like a brief, magical visitation from a musical deity. Lindsay Zoladz
Both Sides Now (Joni Mitchell) | World Within A Song (Jeff Tweedy)
There are some songs so perfect it’s impossible to imagine them ever not existing. Melodies so seamless that it makes no sense to contemplate how they were constructed. Miniature suns and moons. Here long before us, and sure to survive long after we’re gone. Music that arrives not as something new but as something that finally has a name. This song feels like it’s been a part of me for as long as I’ve had a me to feel.
It seems certain that I must have heard this song as an infant. Judy Collins’s version was riding high on the charts shortly after my first birthday, so it’s not unlikely that it would have seeped into my consciousness around the same exact time my developing mind’s language centers were just kicking into gear. If that’s the explanation for this feeling I have that this song is purely a geological fact, then lucky me. What a gift it’s been to have this song on speed dial my entire life. I can’t always remember all of the words, but the melody is always there. It almost feels like it has a specific physical presence. With its own unique feeling. Like a grade school locker-lined hallway. Or maybe it’s more like a loved one’s face. Like how I can close my eyes and see my sister as a young woman getting married, then later, smiling beneath silver-grey bangs. Like how both those images ARE my sister to me, wherever I am in the world.
It’s love that I’m describing, isn’t it? I trust this song so much. Its wisdom, lyrically, is astonishing. And as simple as it may sound, “Something’s lost, but something’s gained / In living every day,” when combined with such an indelible melody, is a pretty remarkable bit of consolation to have coming out of your radio. And, in turn, on a loop in your head for over fifty years. How? Joni Mitchell was barely out of her teens when she wrote this song. So again I ask, how? Pure magic. Pure genius.
If somehow you aren’t familiar with this song, please go listen to it now if you can. Trust me, you need it. And if it doesn’t keep you company for a long time, I hope you have a song that feels, to you, the way I’ve described this one. I’d be lost without it.
So . . . It’s a good thing it can’t be taken away from me. Not even if I never heard it again. It is a part of the world I live in. Like air and water.
