Last month, the coolest thing happened: Tracy Chapman showed up on stage at the Grammys to sing “Fast Car” with Luke Combs. Listening to that took me back to eighth grade when I heard it for the first time. The angst I felt in my soul then resurfaced and I processed some of my teen feelings with a new frame of reference, which, if you are open to it, you gain as you grow older.

I grew up in a small suburban town in upstate New York. We shared a postal code with the adjacent city, so my town was so small we did not have a post office, but not so small that we did not have any stop lights. My ancestors arrived almost 400 years ago and settled there, along the Mohawk River, and I grew up in a small house five minutes from the cemetery that housed all their graves. I cut down Christmas trees on the remaining 20 acres from that original colonial plot every year. Maybe this all sounds great, but for me it was suffocating.

I hated it there. I hated the conversations people had in that town. I hated the way girls were treated. I hated how no one seemed interested in anything I was interested in, which never included makeup or boy bands. And I thought I had to live there forever because people who had my DNA had lived there forever. When I first heard “Fast Car,” I thought, “Oh no, I can leave. If I have a fast car, I can leave.” And while I have never gotten that fast car, I left and never went back for any serious length of time after the age of 20. And I haven’t been there since my grandmother passed away over a decade ago.

While listening to “Fast Car” again — and yes, I was part of the 38,000% download increase in the days following the Grammys — other lyrics took hold of my soul. She says, “Any place is better,” and I thought about that a lot. As a teenager, I was convinced that everywhere was different from my hometown and that if I could leave, everything would be better. I’m very happy here in Utah, where my not-so-fast car took me when I made my escape. But my child says she might want to go to Massachusetts. She tells me how funny it is that I came here so that she would turn around and go back. Let’s be clear, I’m not from Massachusetts and I would never have moved there, because, you know, they have the Red Sox. But for my child, maybe that place is better.

Another lyric, “I had a feeling I belonged … I had a feeling I could be someone,” hits differently today. For my teenage self, it was about not being in that small town and if I were anywhere else, I would belong and I would be someone. That high school and those people were not my people and no amount of effort on my part to fit in was going to work — and, trust me, I went through fits of trying. It became about getting out: first going to a good college and then moving far away. This wasn’t easy. I miss the east coast and to this day, when I visit, I wonder why I don’t still live there. Not in that small town I grew up in; the state is big and I could live somewhere else in New York. But even with all that homesickness that still strikes, I feel like I belong here in Utah, and I feel I have become someone.

Listening to that song again, I realize it probably never was about my hometown at all; it was always about me. When you have questions in your soul and a wandering disposition, and you have all the swagger of being a descendent of people who crossed an ocean in the 17th century because “any place is better,” you leave. You get into your fast car and you leave.

But maybe my hometown would have been a good place if I could have realized it was about me, and that trying to fit in isn’t the same thing as belonging. Maybe I could have been open to the possibilities that my people were there too. We’ll see. Maybe this summer I’ll drive through Rotterdam with my windows down, listening to “Fast Car,” and see if I can see something in that small town.

Leah Murray is a Brady Distinguished Presidential Professor of Political Science and the director of the Olene S. Walker Institute of Politics & Public Service at Weber State University.

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