"The verse melody is subtly strange, and it took me a while to figure out why": A music professor breaks down the theory and production behind Tracy Chapman's Fast Car

Tracy Chapman - Fast Car (Official Music Video) - YouTube

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Tracy Chapman was thrust back in the spotlight this month following a stunning performance of her 1988 single Fast Car with Luke Combs at the Grammy Awards; the track has since bounced back into the Billboard Hot 100, 36 years after its release.

In a 1990 Time Magazine profile, Richard Stengel described Chapman’s voice as “a rich contralto that seemed to come from a hundred miles away. A sweet, sad, wise voice that haunted almost all who heard it. A voice that seemed to know things they didn’t.” 

Combs seems a little superfluous next to this voice, but the song does work beautifully in a countrified arrangement with pedal steel and fiddle. Combs’ Grammy-nominated cover reached number one on the country charts, making Chapman the first Black female solo songwriter to have a song in that position. 

Chapman says she was surprised and delighted by this turn of events, though maybe she shouldn’t have been surprised. In this NPR interview, she says that she was inspired to play the guitar in part by watching Buck Owens and Minnie Pearl on Hee Haw as a kid. 

Chapman got a major career boost from her appearance at a 1988 concert in honor of Nelson Mandela’s 70th birthday at Wembley. Stevie Wonder was supposed to make a surprise guest appearance, but at the last minute, no one was able to find the disk with all of his Synclavier presets. 

Even though all his gear was set up onstage, Stevie reluctantly pulled out. Tracy Chapman had already finished her planned set, but she was asked to go back onstage and fill some time. She did unaccompanied performances of Fast Car and Talkin' 'Bout a Revolution to a sensational response.

Tracy Chapman - Fast Car [Wembley 1988] - YouTube

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Chapman’s performance bumped up her record sales up by an order of magnitude, and  Fast Car became a number six single, while her self-titled debut album went to number one on the album charts.

Luke Combs was not the first artist to cover Fast Car; there are dozens of other versions out there. Most of them take the same faithful and reverent approach that Combs does. There have also been some less reverent approaches, ranging from reggae to experimental indie to techno, none of which I find particularly inspiring. I do like Sometimes I Rhyme Slow by Nice & Smooth (1991), an easygoing rap over a sample of the intro.

Nice and Smooth- Sometimes I Rhyme Slow... (1991) - YouTube

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There has been endless discussion of the story that Fast Car tells. Some of the discourse has been silly, as Alex Abed-Santos points out in Vox. I don’t have much to add, except to say that I hear the last verse as being directed at the narrator’s kids. I also find it remarkable how many lines in the song don’t rhyme. But compelling though the lyrics are, Fast Car isn’t a short story or a poem, it’s a song, and it’s worth thinking about it in musical terms too.

The theory

The song begins with a fingerpicked guitar riff that will repeat without interruption for the entire first two minutes. Chapman is playing in G major with a capo on the second fret of the guitar, so everything sounds in A major. Here’s a good guitar tutorial. The riff uses simple-sounding chords:

||: D  A | F#m  E :||

This is a straightforward enough chord progression, but it sounds mysterious and ambiguous the way Chapman plays it. Why? For one thing, the voicings are bare and skeletal, just a few notes each. 

Also, the note A pedals (repeats) through all of them, creating a hypnotic drone-like effect. Chapman plays the D with C-sharp on top of it and then hammers the D on and off. That leads into the A, which she plays as a power chord, just A and E. Some people hear the D as feeling like a pickup rather than a clear beginning, which confuses the ear as to where the loop actually starts. It’s a nice effect.

From A, Chapman slides up the neck to F#m. This is a neat contrapuntal trick, because while the chord is moving up, the root is moving down from A to F-sharp. The last chord is the strangest one. The root is E and the top note is G-sharp, which suggests a regular E chord, but there’s still that A pedaling through it, and that is not a note in the chord. 

If you play A and G-sharp together in isolation, you get a gnarly dissonance. Some charts write this chord as Esus4, but that would mean that A is replacing G-sharp, not coexisting with it. A more accurate chord symbol would be E(add4). You could also hear the chord as Amaj7 with E in the bass, but E would be a more typical chord to follow F#m, so that colors your expectations. It’s ultimately ambiguous.

The verse melody is subtly strange, and it took me a while to figure out why. Chapman is using notes from the A major scale, which is not a surprising choice in the key of A major. However, with a chord loop starting on D, you would expect the melody to include the note D, and Chapman studiously avoids that note in the verses. In the first verse, she uses every note in A major except for D. At first, I thought, hmm, maybe she’s singing A major pentatonic. That’s the A major scale without the fourth and seventh degrees (D and G-sharp). 

Major pentatonic is very common in pop, rock, folk and blues. However, Chapman isn’t singing the pentatonic. She sings G-sharp right in the very first line of the song, on the second half of “fast” and the word “car”, and many more times after that. Pop and rock melodies tend not to use G-sharp in the key of A, especially not over a D chord, and even more especially when they are so pointedly avoiding D.

The other unusual feature of the verse melody is that almost every phrase ends on the note A over that ambiguous E chord in the riff. These concluding As in the melody agree with the A pedal tone, but they clash with the G-sharp on top of the chord. 

Together with the avoidance of D, the verse melody is an example of melodic-harmonic divorce, where the notes in the melody and the notes in the harmony come from the same key, but the melody notes don’t agree with the specific chords underneath them. Melodic-harmonic divorce has become a common feature of current pop songs, but it was more rare back in the late 80s.

There’s a pop songwriting cliche: “Don’t bore us, get to the chorus.” In Fast Car, however, the chorus only appears after four pairs of verses and interludes, two full minutes into the song. That is a very long time for a radio single! Apparently, Chapman’s label was concerned about the chorus coming in so late, but producer David Kershenbaum couldn’t find a way to move it earlier without harming the song, so he insisted that it stay put. 

On the line “so remember when we were driving”, Chapman finally sings the long-avoided note D, on the second syllable of “remember.” My fellow songwriting teacher Shane Beales quotes his students as saying that the D combined with the snare hits going into the chorus is like the sound of the engine starting up when the key turns in the ignition. That is a great analogy. The remarkable thing is that the note D never appears in the song again, except in the corresponding place in the other two choruses. And Chapman never once sings D over the D chord.

The first two lines of the chorus continue the chord progression from the verse riff, but with a slower harmonic rhythm: one chord per bar, rather than two chords per bar in the verses. Also, Chapman switches from minimalist fingerpicking to full strummed chords. 

On the word “I”, the harmonic rhythm changes again, with D moving to F#m after only a beat and a half. There’s a bar of E under the words “had a feeling that I belonged”. This little figure repeats, and then there’s an unexpected extra bar at the end, where Chapman repeats “be someone, be someone” over D and E chords. The odd phrase length is particularly disruptive after the hypnotic repetition of the main riff, but the disruption doesn’t last: the riff resumes immediately afterwards.

| D      | A  | F#m    | E  |

| D  F#m | E  | D  F#m | E  | D  E |

The song’s tempo starts at a laid-back 97 beats per minute, and gradually picks up to 106 BPM by the second chorus. This doesn’t come across as a lack of steadiness; the tempo increase feels like an expressive choice, creating a mounting sense of urgency. 

The rhythm section mostly stay out of Chapman’s way under the verses, but the drums in the choruses rock out. When you open up the song in a DAW, it’s easy to spot the choruses, because the waveform gets almost twice as thick. Once the choruses end, the dynamics settle right back down to the tight restraint of the verses.

The production

In this Mix Magazine article, David Kershenbaum talks about the song's recording process. 

Chapman had never played with a band before recording her first album. Kershenbaum recorded her unaccompanied vocal and guitar to digital multitrack tape machine and then tried out five different pairs of bassists and drummers to see who fit the vibe the best. He eventually settled on bassist Larry Klein (Joni Mitchell’s sometime producer and former husband) and drummer Denny Fongheiser.

Chapman, Klein and Fongheiser recorded the final track together live, with Chapman in the vocal booth singing and playing guitar, Klein playing his bass in the control room plugged directly into the board, Fongheiser on drums in the studio’s main room. Chapman sang into a vintage Neumann TLM 49 mic. There was a sheet of cardboard over her guitar so it wouldn’t bleed into the vocal mic too much. Apparently, the song didn’t take much work to get down; Chapman recorded the entire album in less than a week. 

The track isn’t completely live; there are some tasteful overdubs too. The guitar is doubletracked, which is standard practice for acoustic folk. (If you’ve ever wondered why your guitar strumming sounds so thin and weak on recordings, it’s because you’re not doubletracking like the pros do.) There’s some electric guitar overdubbed too, but the Mix Magazine article doesn’t mention who played it. The album credits include Ed Black on pedal steel and Jack Holder on electric guitar, so it could be either or both of them.

The lyrics

How autobiographical is Fast Car? Tracy Chapman is a private person, and she has spoken in interviews about inventing characters rather than writing directly about herself. But the song’s social commentary is probably motivated at least in part by her life experience. 

In her article Talkin’ Bout a Revolution(ary): The Music and Politics of Tracy Chapman, Dr. Rasheedah A. Jenkins discusses Chapman’s roots and influences. Chapman was raised by a single mother in Cleveland, in conditions of some hardship: she recalls the power and gas being shut off, and waiting in line with her mother for food stamps. 

Chapman was a good student, and she won a scholarship to a fancy private boarding school in Connecticut. She describes the scholarship as a “saving grace”, given the state of Cleveland’s public schools, but it was also a major culture shock for her. Only ten percent of the students were people of color, and most of those were scholarship students. Chapman found the privileged white students to be oblivious, and their questions to be frequently insulting. You could easily imagine how this would fuel her political sensibilities.

Chapman was an atypical 80s pop star. She looked and sounded different from other prominent politically-minded Black artists of the time, like Public Enemy and Boogie Down Productions. She also didn’t sound much like other women singer-songwriters, or look like them; her short dreadlocks, plain t-shirts and jeans were a stark contrast to the era’s glammed-out female beauty standards. 

But Chapman isn’t a total outlier, either. Dr. Jenkins points out that she is part of a lineage of Black female protest singers like Nina Simone, Bernice Johnson Reagon and Odetta, whom Chapman has cited as a musical inspiration, as well as activists like Angela Davis and Ida B. Wells. Is the renewed attention on Fast Car going to make its listeners feel more compassion? We can hope.