#luke combs

About last night ✨

2026 TIME100 Gala | Jazz at Lincoln Center | NYC | April 23, 2026

Tracy Chapman has herself said that she didn’t mind the remake because she is the sole writer of the song, and as such, she appreciates the royalties.

Luke’s version is getting a lot of airtime, but so is Tracy’s original version.

And Luke’s sincere and obvious appreciation of Chapman’s song is just icing on the cake:

When Luke Combs set out to cover Tracy Chapman's 1988 hit “Fast Car”, he did it out of complete admiration for the song

Although not every lyric makes sense being covered by a male vocalist, he decided not to deviate from the original lyrics out of respect for its original songwriter.

“You want to just be mega respectful of the original song,” Combs tells Kelleigh Bannen on Today's Country Radio. “That's why in that song ... it’s, ‘Work in the market as a checkout girl.’ I didn’t change that in my version — I really wanted to just do the original version of the song.”

Combs really wanted to bring the song as it was intended to be in presenting it to a new generation of fans who may have only been vaguely familiar with the original.

“It’s weird because you’re doing a cover of it, and you say, ‘I don’t want to make it my own, because I really just want to shine a light on the original version and bring that.’”

“Because I think there’s so many people that maybe know that song, or it would be familiar to them, but they really don’t know anything about it,” he explains. “They’ve never really listened to it.”

“When I recorded this, literally the engineer in there asked me who I wrote that song with,” Combs adds.

New music festival lineup just dropped. How many of these artists have you heard of?

alright patrick