A Ticket to Anywhere

Aretha Franklin knew what she was talking about.

“Music does a lot of things for a lot of people,” the Queen of Soul once said. “It’s transporting, for sure. It can take you right back, years back, to the very moment certain things happened in your life.”

I did some emotional time traveling last week while listening to Eighties songs on YouTube. I was barely attention to the hits as they went rolling by until Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” came on.

And then I was flying, bouncing through the years until I reached 1988, when I had just moved to Stroudsburg, PA to work as a reporter at the Pocono Record.

This was more than a typical memory or recollection. It really seemed like I was back at my old apartment on Scott Street, feeling so lost and unsure of myself, convinced I had made a terrible mistake by moving here from Brooklyn, but too terrified to do anything but keep going forward.

At the time there was an agent looking my novel, while a buddy of mine and his partner were trying to raise funds to shoot a screenplay I had written.

I was high on hopium, convinced that either my book or my script—or both—were going to get published and produced, I’d been rich and famous, and I wouldn’t have to work for small town newspapers.

Like the character in the song, I wanted to be someone, be someone.

I was feeling pretty miserable until that song came on the radio. I heard the opening guitar and Tracy Chapman’s unique voice, and I forgot all my problems and listened to the story of two young lovers yearning for a new life.

“You got a fast car, and I got a plan to get us out of here,” the song goes. “Been working at the convenience store, managed to save just a little bit of money.”

'You Seem to Know My Story'

The desperation comes out as she sings about making a decision to leave “tonight or live and die this way.”

The couple does escape their hometown, but we hear their lives take a dismal turn as the man stays out drinking and sees more of his friends than he does of his kids.

The more I think of it, the more I realize that I had moved to the kind of town that the characters were trying to escape.

“Fast Car” was the lead single from Chapman’s self-titled album and went on to win a Grammy for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance and peaked at number six on the Billboard Hot 100.

Chapman appeared at the Nelson Mandela 70th Birthday Tribute concert in June 1988, where she performed "Fast Car" and "Across the Lines" and her appearance brought widespread attention to her music.

The story goes that just before surprise guest Stevie Wonder walked onstage, he learned that his keyboard's floppy disk had gone missing.

He left in a panic, forcing the event organizers to usher Chapman back to the stage with nothing but a microphone and her guitar.

In an interview Tracy Chapman said Fast Car “very generally” represents the world that she saw when she was growing up in Cleveland, Ohio, although the song is not directly autobiographical.

“I had so many people come up to me and say that they felt it was their song and someone told me at one point that they thought I’ve been reading their mail, they were saying, ‘You seem to know my story,’ and people would come up and tell me about a car relationship and some detail that they felt was in the song that represented something that happened in their lives.”

Up until recently, Tracy Chapman had been largely out of the public eye, with her last album of original songs coming out in 2008.

However, she made a surprise appearance at the 2024 Grammy and performed “Fast Car” with Luke Combs, who had covered the song.

I spent five years in Stroudsburg, before moving on to Waterbury, CT for four more years and returning to Brooklyn in 1998. Nothing ever came of that screenplay, but the novel eventually got published, though I am neither rich nor famous.

The years went by so quickly—speed so fast, I felt like I was drunk—but it doesn’t take much to go right to the very moment certain things happened in your life.