We do so much translating with the things we love, the art we love! My life was staunchly suburban and these were not city lights and it would be years and years until someone’s arm felt nice wrapped around my shoulder. If we were lucky it would be all lit up by lightning bugs.Īnd if we were really lucky - or if I was, at least I have no idea whether this was how Christina heard it - the field would drop into view as Tracy was singing, “City lights lay out before usĪnd your arm felt nice wrapped round my shoulderĪnd I - I had a feeling I could be someone, be someone, be someone.” There were all these sort of gentle rollers that we would accelerate and crest, and then our stomachs would drop, and I remember this one spot in particular where all of a sudden this field on the corner of my road would come into view. So we’d listen to music, loud, and the car would cut through the dark. By the time she took me home every evening we’d have been together for hours and run out of things to say. I grew up in a semi-rural suburb outside a small Rust Belt city, and when she drove me home the road would get darker and darker, fewer street lights, more space between the houses. What I remember most clearly is how cinematic and true the song felt to me. In that high school way we mostly did nothing - watched South Park, invented weird projects for ourselves, read time-travel Viking romances next to the pool at her dad’s condo, drove around a lot. She was 18, had graduated, was about to go to college. ( Remembrance of Things Past reverie ahead!) So I was 14 years old when I first heard “Fast Car” in my friend Christina’s . . . SE: Your mom was kind of hip, because MY mom, when she found a Tracy Chapman CD on my bedroom floor when I was fourteen, looked at the cover, sneered, and said, “No wonder you’re suicidal if you’ve been listening to this shit!” (And by “kind of hip” I think I mean “capable of giving healthy love”?)īut also, my mom was the implicated first time I heard Tracy Chapman, too. I couldn’t decide if I loved these songs or if they were just making me feel something, but I was positive they were sung by a boy. My mom was playing her CD on the massive boom box we kept in the kitchen to facilitate family dance parties. The first in a series on Lilith Fair artists and their evocative all-consuming everlasting meaning to our adult selves.ĪHP: The first time I heard Tracy Chapman I was in grade school. By Anne Helen Petersen and Simone Eastman

Tracy chapman the promise vagalume