Back on track about love

By GLYN BROWN

Tracy Chapman is back in the ring. Which will come as a surprise to many, because it seemed she'd thrown in the towel. In fact, she has been turning out albums at a relatively regular pace (five so far).

The low profile may be the result of a certain lack of definition, one recording following another with no real new territory explored, plus Chapman's own huge reluctance to use the press.

But last year Collection appeared, a round-up of her most notable tracks.

It was a shock, first as a reminder of how poignant and powerful her music can be, then in the sales, which were almost instantly multi-platinum.

Now, a new release is ready. Called Let It Rain, it is produced by P.J. Harvey's cohort John Parrish, but difficulties await the journalist trying to find out what Parrish might contribute to her gently passionate manner.

There have been few interviews with the wary Chapman, and in those that exist she rears back from personal questions.

Consistent with this mode of privacy, no one is allowed to hear the album until an hour before the interview. At the studio, in foggy Sausalito, where the album Let It Rain is being mastered, there's relief on the listen-through.

It has a dark, serrated quality. Some tracks are faux-jaunty, pedal steel and accordion on others give a country feel, while others are yearning with string quartets.

The singer, long dreadlocks around an incredibly pretty face, all forehead and sweeping cheekbones, makes herself a herbal tea and we adjourn to the mixing-room.

Chapman, 38, grew up in Cleveland, Ohio with her mother and older sister. Her dad walked out when she was 4.

She was keen on animals, playing music and books. She and her sister Aneta were almost Bronte-esque, turning out armfuls of poems and stories.

"I was pretty serious, but I grew up in a rough neighbourhood and my mother was a little overprotective.

"The one place we were allowed to go on our own was the public library, and we spent all our time there. I'd get books home and try to figure out what they were about."

That kind of studiousness makes you no one's friend. Was she bullied? "Oh, yeah. Early on, I didn't fit in with the other kids, and much of that was because they thought I was bookish, a goody-two-shoes type.

"Teacher's pet. It just makes you read more, y'know - what else can you do? No one wants to hang out with you."

Cleveland's neighbourhoods weren't segregated but the schools were, which involved bussing.

"When I was growing up it was economically depressed because the steel industry and the rubber plants were closing, and the auto factories were downsizing.

"And it was a dirty city, very toxic because of the industrial waste. Culturally, it was diverse, and our neighbourhood was pretty integrated. And then the white families started to leave. There was always tension."

"It felt like the kind of racism people assume existed in parts of the South in the late-60s, in that you'd go to a public pool and there'd be a sign saying 'Whites only'."

The education programme "A Better Chance" got Chapman a place at the private, politically enlightened Wooster school in Connecticut, where the yearbook has her billed as the student "most likely to marry her guitar".

She went from there to Tufts University in Boston, where, apart from studying anthropology, she played in clubs and bars. She was spotted busking by a fellow-student whose father ran the record label SBK; she met the man, he called up Elektra, and Chapman found herself with a deal.

At 24, her first record ready to go, she performed at Wembley for the Nelson Mandela 70th-birthday concert in 1988, televised worldwide. The impact was instant.

The album, Tracy Chapman, hauled in awards and still sounds startlingly good, from Talkin 'Bout a Revolution to Fast Car and Baby, Can I Hold You. And Chapman's two-pronged agenda was set: analysis of disenfranchisement and powerlessness, politically and personally, which carried through the next few albums - Crossroads, Matters Of The Heart and New Beginning.



Despite seeing the best in people, or trying to, Chapman clearly hasn't always had the best of them and is, as we know, often ill at ease with others.

Two years ago, she spoke of anxiety during a tour, when audience members jumped on the stage.

Now she says, "The experience of performing can be a joy, but it can be terrifying, too, because there's this mass of people in front of you. And they really have more power than those on stage. If emotions change, it can get dangerous pretty quickly."

Then there's love. Chapman has written some of the most moving love songs going, yet in almost all of them she gives her heart to someone who won't respond, or who lets her down.

In the new track Happy, however, she's the one who can't commit (that is, if the song's about her).

Has she been hurt that badly? Or maybe she really is kind of happy now? She buries her face in an ecstasy of shyness. "I'm kind of happy."

That means she's happy with someone or happy alone, the lyric looks at those who are offered love but just aren't able to believe it.

"Yeah. And also they don't recognise it, because what you see represented as love in the media is so false, it's all scripted, violins and whatever, and has nothing to do with reality.

"So if they're not experiencing that, then they don't see what they have."

- INDEPENDENT

* Let It Rain is released on Friday.