Tracy Chapman wrote her life-changing hit Fast Car in one night
In a Q interview, the American singer-songwriter also looks back on her performance at Wembley Stadium
In 1988, the world was introduced to Tracy Chapman when she performed her song Fast Car for a massive crowd of 90,000 people at Wembley Stadium. The concert, which was a birthday tribute to Nelson Mandela, was broadcast to 600 million people around the world, elevating Chapman as an important new American voice.
Today, 35 years later, the story of that concert is legendary. Before getting drafted in as a last-minute replacement for Stevie Wonder, Chapman was a virtually unknown singer-songwriter whose background was in street performing. Though stepping out onstage at Wembley was a daunting experience, she credits her years spent busking on street corners for teaching her how to hold a crowd's attention with just her voice and a guitar.
"I was clearly overwhelmed," Chapman tells Q guest host Garvia Bailey in a rare interview. "It was the largest audience I'd ever been in front of…. Because I was solo acoustic — it was just me and the guitar — they realized they could slot me in at any point in the show. And so we were just waiting in the green room and then they came and said, 'Look, you're on.' And that was it. There was no warning."
Fast Car, the lead single off Chapman's self-titled debut album, shot her to stardom and won her a Grammy. It not only changed her life, but the life of countless fans, like the British novelist Zadie Smith, who recently wrote about Chapman's impact in a piece for The Guardian.
While some life-changing hits take years to write, Chapman says she wrote Fast Car in a single night in 1986.
"It was pretty late or early in the morning, maybe two or three in the morning," she says. "I was up, I was playing [guitar], my dog was sitting next to me on the couch — a miniature dachshund, extremely important to the story — and I started playing that line on the guitar and came up with the first line of the song. It developed from there. I think I wrote most of the song that night and then I went back and revised it throughout the week. So in a way, it was quick. There's some songs that take me years to finish, but that was not one."
The full interview with Tracy Chapman is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and follow wherever you get your podcasts.
Interview with Tracy Chapman produced by Lise Hosein.