In her high school yearbook,
Tracy Chapman's classmates predicted she would grow up to marry her
acoustic guitar and live happily ever after. "It's very silly, but that's
how everyone saw me [laughs]. My guitar was always somewhere
nearby," she recalls. "There was a time when I wouldn't travel without
one." For example, during high school she received a scholarship to
attend a summer cultural exchange program in Switzerland. While living
with a family and touring cities, she and her guitar were inseparable.
Chapman admits that attachment bordered on the laughable at times. "My
guitar stayed close by me the entire trip. I never left it where it
wasn't safe," she says. "Once we visited a cathedral and everyone wanted
to climb to the tower to see the view. I refused to leave my guitar.
So I carried it up this narrow, winding stone staircase."
Today, Chapman is coupled
to more than one guitar (she estimates that she owns 20). In her San
Francisco home, she usually has one out of its case in each room, ready
to strum into action should a new song beckon. "I always write using
a guitar," she says. "Songs present themselves to me. It's an elusive
process. I might discover something when I'm playing a new chord or
trying out a fingerpicking style. Or it could come from a happy accident—your
hand just goes to the right place on the guitar neck and a song emerges."
Chapman's latest collection
of serendipitous songs, Let It Rain, features the same artful
combination of indelible melodies and poignant lyrics found on the eponymous
debut album that launched her career in 1988. Highlighted by the riveting
story song and hit single "Fast Car," Tracy Chapman presented
a 24-year-old singer-songwriter who could express the torment of disappointment
and frustration while also shining glints of hope born of perseverance.
Twelve years later, Chapman approaches similar emotional territory on
Let It Rain, a quieter, more intimate album than previous outings.
The temperament of the songs ranges from somber and ominous to playful
and festive, with the darker moments dominating the lighthearted.
Chapman's acoustic guitar
plays a central role, framing the simple melodies and operating as the
rhythmic heart. Produced by Chapman and John Parish (who has overseen
projects by PJ Harvey, Sparklehorse, and the Eels), Let It Rain
is marked by subtle sonic shadings: pedal steel, electric, and baritone
guitar colors by Greg Leisz; dark-roast cello flavors by Matt Brubeck;
glistening accordion lines by Patrick Warren; and an array of gritty-to-quirky
guitar and keyboard textures supplied by session ace Joe Gore (who's
responsible for the scratchy-record sound in the mix of the broken-romance
ballad "Goodbye"). Her rhythm team is longtime bassist Andy Stoller
and drummer Joey Waronker.
On record, Chapman's sweetly
dark voice is infused with melancholic soul, imbued with traces of mirth
in the upbeat tunes and fragile resignation in the more pain-laden songs.
But in person, she is warm, affable, quick to laugh, and quietly unassuming.
She has a reputation for being private and diffident, and especially
reluctant to address probing questions about her song lyrics, but today
Chapman exhibits none of that timidity. In the spacious windowed lounge
of Elektra Records' New York headquarters, she sips a cup of honeyed
herbal tea and reflects on her new album and her career, becoming most
animated when talking about her stable of guitars and the equipment
she uses to coax out their best sonic personalities in the studio and
on tour.
When asked what inspired
her to play the guitar, Chapman can't pinpoint the exact moment. "I'm
not certain why I picked up the guitar, but I started singing, I'm told,
when I began to talk. Music was a part of my early life," she recalls.
Born and raised in a working-class Cleveland, Ohio, neighborhood, Chapman
was given a ukulele when she was quite young. She doesn't remember if
she ever learned how to play it or how long she had it, but she vividly
recalls another instrument, the one she first became fascinated with.
"My parents bought an organ, with the keys on the right and buttons
on the left with the chords," she says. "I taught myself how to play
and even wrote some songs on it. As for the guitar, nobody in my family
played one and neither did my friends. All I remember is asking my mom
for a guitar when I was seven or eight."
Chapman thinks the request
might have been the result of her mother's fondness for Hee Haw,
the late-'60s, early-'70s television variety program of hayseed jokes
and country music. "My mother loved watching that show [laughs].
That might have been why I wanted a guitar. I remember guys like Buck
Owens and Glen Campbell playing these jumbo guitars that were very ornate.
I loved watching them fingerpick," she says.
After her wish was granted,
Chapman got a chord book and began teaching herself to play. She borrowed
songbooks from the library. "Most of the tunes I tried were traditional,
stuff in the public domain," she recalls. "I had never heard most of
them, so I didn't even know how the melodies went." A few years later
Chapman took her first guitar lessons through a summer program offered
by the Cleveland Boys' Club. The sessions culminated in a recital. Chapman's
performance? Playing the melody line of "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious"
from Mary Poppins. "I still have the music my teacher gave me
[laughs]. I suppose it might have sounded more interesting if
I had picked the melody while playing chords." Chapman took clarinet
lessons in elementary school, learning music theory and how to read
and performing in the school band and orchestra. "I was serious about
the clarinet," she recalls. "But I also loved singing and you can't
sing and play the clarinet at the same time. So I drifted away from
it and bonded more with my guitar, which I was still playing on the
side to entertain myself."
At that time, Chapman was
mostly listening to the same music her family preferred. "Growing up
I didn't have many records," she recalls. "My parents and my sister
did. They controlled the stereo and the radio. So I tuned into what
they liked. My mother loved gospel and R&B, and my sister was into a
little of everything: David Bowie, Barbra Streisand, Tony Bennett, Prince,
Judy Garland, Michael Jackson. I'd hear that music in the background
while I was in my room playing my guitar."
In her mid-teens, Chapman
received an academic scholarship to attend the Wooster School, a small
boarding school in Danbury, Connecticut, where she took classical guitar
lessons for a semester. "Having been self-taught, I wasn't playing by
the rules," Chapman recalls. "I was holding the guitar roughly where
it was supposed to be, but I had a lot of bad habits to break—like
not using my little finger as a brace—and I learned to hold my
hand in a better position to play barre chords."
Chapman's experience at
Wooster was encouraging. Some of her classmates were guitarists, and
often they'd get together and teach each other tunes. She also played
at the campus coffeehouse, for parents-day dinners, and at chapel services.
When Chapman's guitar teacher discovered she was writing songs, he helped
her find new chords to explore, and when the school's chaplain, Reverend
Robert Tate, also a guitarist, saw the condition of the two guitars
she carted to school, he loaned her a Guild and took up a collection
to buy her a new guitar. "My mother bought my first guitar, my sister
bought my second," Chapman says. "They were cheap, assembly-line guitars.
The first one had such bad action and the strings were so high off the
fretboard that my fingers bled when I played it. It was such a big difference
when I got my first real guitar: a dreadnought Fender acoustic I bought
in a New York City guitar shop with the money from school. It was the
nicest guitar I could afford at the time. I used it on my first record.
I loved the sound of it."
After Wooster, Chapman attended
Tufts University, just outside of Boston, focusing on anthropology and
African studies. But she also took a music theory class and a course
in African drumming as well as extracurricular lessons with a blues
guitar teacher. The first guitar solo she learned was B.B. King's lead
on "The Thrill Is Gone." With a growing songbook of her own material,
Chapman performed on the streets, at Harvard Square, in subway stations,
and at Cambridge and Boston coffeehouses.
What was that like for a
shy woman in her early 20s? "It was really scary," she says, grinning.
"It was nerve-racking. But my friends encouraged me. They showed up
and cheered me on. That made it easier." She complemented her own material
with a few traditional blues and folk tunes, and spirituals like "Amazing
Grace." Gradually her powerful songs—emotionally charged and intellectually
compelling—garnered growing crowds.
A classmate, Brian Koppelman,
introduced her music to his father, Charles Koppelman, who ran SBK Publishing.
The elder Koppelman signed Chapman to a publishing deal and helped her
secure a management contract with Elliot Roberts, who had worked with
Neil Young and Joni Mitchell. Roberts helped Chapman get signed by Elektra
in 1987. Her debut, consisting of the tunes she had been playing around
Boston, was released in the spring of 1988 and became an improbable
success—selling ten million copies worldwide while helping to revitalize
the women's singer-songwriter movement. Her heady songs featured spare
acoustic guitar arrangements and broached such sociopolitical themes
as domestic violence and racial injustice. "Fast Car" is a compelling
story about the na•vetŽ of leaving a small town for a promising life
in the big city, while "Talkin' 'Bout a Revolution" (written five years
earlier) anticipated a time when "poor people gonna rise up." The album
scored Chapman three Grammy awards, including Best New Artist.
Soon Chapman was playing
large venues, opening shows for 10,000 Maniacs and performing at an
internationally televised concert for Nelson Mandela's 70th birthday
party at Wembley Arena in London and later on the Amnesty International
tour that featured Sting, Bruce Springsteen, Youssou N'Dour, and Peter
Gabriel. She quickly became a headliner and continued to record albums—Crossroads
(1989) and Matters of the Heart (1992)—which were well received
but didn't sell as well as her premier disc. Chapman's New Beginning
(1995) was a hit, boosted by the popularity of the bluesy "Give
Me One Reason." Five years later, she returned with Telling Stories,
which featured a cameo by Emmylou Harris. In 2001, Collection, a
greatest-hits package, was released.
Let It Rain is only
Chapman's sixth album of new material in 15 years, but she's never been
pressured to produce more. "I have a contract that has a schedule for
delivering and releasing new albums," she says. "But I never think that
I have to write to make a new record. I write the same way I have since
I was eight because I love music. The songs just come to me."
The music and lyrics arrive
together, Chapman says. "I'm never sure why I'm writing a song. It's
mysterious. The song comes out of the air. It's some feeling or thought
that comes to me in a moment, in a quiet space when I have my guitar,
a pencil, paper, and a tape recorder." The latter is essential, she
says, recalling times in her youth when she wrote a piece or a fragment
and couldn't remember it later. "A song can be elusive," she says. "That's
why I want to catch it when it first presents itself, when it's really
fresh."
As an example, Chapman cites
the bittersweet title tune of the new album. After being laid up in
bed with the flu for a few days, her fever subsided, so she picked up
a guitar. "I always keep one beside my bed, just in case," she says.
"I was playing one of my older songs when the first line of ÔLet It
Rain' came to me. It intrigued me, so I followed it. I continued to
work on the song throughout the day between naps."
"Let It Rain" is a gray-day
prayer steeped in pain but buoyed by a lonely hope that "help is coming."
The second track, the haunting, gently rocking "Another Sun," is more
like a modern spiritual, with the end of suffering promised only "if
I never see another sun." It's a bleak outlook, yet Chapman transcends
the despondency with an indelible sing-along chorus. She visits the
same "take me away" theme on the upbeat "Say Hallelujah," where joy
ultimately overcomes grief. Chapman gleefully sings, "Say Hallelujah
/ The bucket is kicked, the body is gone" and "Eternal rest for the
weary / Mourners party tonight."
Back on earth, Chapman laments
what might have been in the dark-clouded "Almost," questions the sincerity
of love in the starkly sketched "Happy," and slows the tempo to a dirgelike
pace on "I Am Yours," a quiet tale of lost-love humility. The sentiment
in "I Am Yours" may be dour, but the music is pure beauty as Joe Gore
floats acoustic guitar filigree above Chapman's chordal strum.
As with most of Chapman's
recordings, Let It Rain includes a tune with a political undertow.
The tempo-shifting "Hard Wired" combines a baroque musical sensibility
with an Orwellian view of governmental invasion of privacy, as defined
in the upbeat, bright-stringed chorus:
We've got a box to put
in your brain
Hardwired for
downloading
All the secrets and the mysteries
You've been selfishly withholding
In the end, she sings grimly,
"Your wants, desires, needs, and wishes / Will be duly noted." When
asked about the song's meaning, Chapman says that she's not trying to
be overtly political. "In every song there's a part of me and what my
perspective on the world is," she explains.
Let It Rain also
includes a short, sweetly lyrical instrumental, "Over in Love," which
features Chapman's fingerpicking and coproducer John Parish's acoustic
rhythm guitar. Pianist/vibraphonist Michael Webster arranged the piece
based on Chapman's picking. Interestingly, the song appears on the European
edition of the CD with sung lyrics. But Chapman declines to explain
why. "I'd rather not get into it," she says matter-of-factly. "There
are many reasons, some of them musical."
The new album is the first
time Chapman has worked with Parish, who recently released his second
solo CD, How Animals Move (Thrill Jockey). While auditioning
musicians to record Let It Rain, she kept coming across Parish's
name as both a musician and producer of albums she liked. She talked
with him and found they had overlapping tastes, including T. Rex, David
Bowie, and Johnny Cash. "I wanted to work with a producer who was also
a musician," she says. "I wanted a musician's sensibility, which is
different from someone who focuses on the technical aspects. In talking
to John, I knew he would be able to get inside a song in an intense
way and figure out how it works."
Chapman comes to her studio
sessions fully prepared, recording demos on a Macintosh iBook with MOTU
Digital Performer software and a MOTU 828 interface. "I had most of
the arrangements worked out before we started recording," she says.
"I worked out background vocals, percussion, and bass parts. I laid
down the foundations for most of the songs and once we got into the
studio, built on that. I brought my iBook into the studio with all my
demos on the hard drive."
There were, however, some
surprises in the sessions. Although she had come up with an arrangement
for "In the Dark" beforehand, Chapman never felt comfortable with it.
Most of her tunes are in 4/4 time, so the band tried to give it a different
feel: a slow 6/8. "It sounded cool, but it still didn't feel right,"
she recalls. "We set it aside and went on to another song that Joey
and I worked up a rhythmic pattern to. I went into the vocal booth and
instead of singing the second song, I started singing ÔIn the Dark.'
We were all surprised by how well it worked, so we built it from there."
The song reverted to 4/4 time, but the piano line that ends the tune
is from the 6/8 take.
The song also features a
sonic experiment, running Chapman's voice through a Leslie speaker-like
effect (a Hughes and Kettner Rotosphere pedal) for an eerie, wistful
background vocal. While that type of embellishment is a long way from
her low-tech, one-guitar beginnings, that song and indeed the soul of
Let It Rain derives from the same ineffable source that Chapman
has drawn from since her earliest six-string days. She talks with affection
about her guitars—her inseparable companions, her empathetic confidants
that are ready to catch and caress the songs when they begin to arrive.
Excerpted from
Acoustic
Guitar magazine, April 2003,
No. 124.
