Tracy Chapman: Tracy Chapman

Week 23

THE PITCH

People’s taste in music is so subjective that it’s hard to call whether someone will or won’t love a particular track or artist, even if you know their music preferences inside out. Proposing something I think you’ll like strikes me as a near-impossible objective, so I’m simply sharing something I like.

I listened to this for hours when I was 19/20. I felt here’s someone with a voice and soul and deep musicality who has something to say. To 19-year-old me, she felt authentic; someone with integrity. The timbre of her voice is – to my ears – phenomenal, and there’s an unassuming power to her music. They’re songs I would listen to late at night.

I love the stripped-back simplicity of TC’s songwriting. I feel she knows exactly how she wants each track to sound and she’s in control of that, like when you pick up a book by an author you trust and know you’re in safe hands. There’s quite a bit going on in terms of instruments and percussion but the effect feels pared back and simple. It all orbits around TC’s voice, which is powerfully central. That demonstrates vision and discipline, as well as quality production. She even manages to pull off a critique of capitalism in Mountains o’ Things, yet it feels understated.

You could read the lyrics and think, Christ, this is going to be heavy, but for me the album doesn’t feel sombre (the mostly major keys possibly help). It’s just soulful. And rich.

For me, songs are about the music and the lyrics and the rhythm, but mostly the feel. From your posts, I get the sense that you largely take quite a cerebral approach. Like all art, what we personally connect with and what we don’t is such a peculiar thing that can vary with different stages of life and changing preoccupations. Some writers and stories speak to you; others leave you cold. Same with paintings. Same with music. It’s interesting that as the weeks have progressed, you’ve mentioned listening to some albums in the background or while running, rather than a focused listen.

Music is many things to many people, and isn’t that marvellous? Hope you do – or don’t – enjoy!

Miranda Moore

MY RESPONSE

You’re right, Miranda, whether something works for you definitely about the feel which I think is something undefinable even if (unlike me) you actually have the musical knowledge to be able to pick apart what a piece of music is doing and the musical vocabulary to analyse it. It’s about the moment too. This for you is late at night music – I can see that, it’s reflective, it’s mellow even when it’s raging. And I can see how the politics of it would go right to the heart of a 19/20-year-old’s world view.

But, but, but… This week was not the moment for this album for me. I have been surrounded by people every day with no time and space for mellow and thoughtful and raging. There’s been music, of course, but it’s been compromise music, whatever everyone wanted to listen to and mostly that was not Tracy Chapman unless I was very insistent. I have faithfully listened to the album every day as promised, but it’s been squeezed in and sidelined.

I’d heard of Tracy Chapman, I knew the album’s first two songs, Talkin’ Bout a Revolution and Fast Car but that’s all. I like the way her voice dominates the music and the little tricks of timing and volume that make you listen to every word:

Don’t you know/They’re talking about a revolution?/[whispered] Sounds like a whisper

She says that her mind is made/[music, then more quietly] Up

(Can I call that ‘phrasing’? I think that’s what I mean…)

I want to say something about the politics TC is expressing here but I don’t know where to start. I suppose what it is is that there’s no subtlety to it. She’s making statements that seem to me too blunt and too obvious. I prefer the songs when there’s a story that makes you work a little harder to find the political statement, as in Fast Car, where difficult childhood the character escapes from comes back round to repeat in adulthood, or when it’s funny, as in Mountains o’ Things’ critique of consumerism:

‘It’s gonna take all my mountains o’things/To surround me/Keep all my enemies away/Keep my sadness and loneliness at bay’

But Why? puzzled me. What is this collection of random world problems about? Is the point the lines ‘Love is hate/War is Peace/No is Yes’? Politics is doublespeak?

Interestingly, even though I’m criticising the politics I actually like all the songs that are political better than the two straight love songs, If Not Now… and For You which both seem rather bland.

If anyone I knew had been listening to this album when it came out I think I would have been hugely put off by the politics. I used to close my ears to politics, finding it dull and confusing and imagining that none of it had anything to do with my life. How ridiculously naïve and privileged! Oh dear. Thank goodness my daughters are wiser than I was.

I will come back to this when I have more time and space to be mellow with it. I think it may stick…

WHAT ELSE I’VE LISTENED TO THIS WEEK

Demons in Brentford (blues compilation which I listened to mainly for this track)

Elvis Costello This Year’s Model

Fleetwood Mac Rumours

Koko Taylor Koko Taylor

Stax o’ Soul (soul compilation obvs)

Boomtown Rats A Tonic for the Troops

Christy Moore Ride On

Joni Mitchell Blue

Taylor Swift Folklore

XTC English Settlement

Joan Armatrading Track Record

Rickie Lee Jones Pirates