Hard to believe that it’s seventeen years since Tracy Chapman arrived on the scene almost fully-formed with her huge-selling eponymous debut. Unusually for its time (Reagan was still in power and Madonna was top of the charts, remember) it boasted a rare depth and dignity, with great songs of the calibre of ‘Fast Car’, ‘Baby Can I Hold You’ and the polemical ‘Talking ‘Bout A Revolution’. Since then she has continued in more or less the same vein, her spiritually-inclined acoustic folk-rock rarely failing to strike a chord with the masses.
On first listen, her latest outing offers more of the same, but it soon becomes clear that Where You Live is her strongest collection since that groundbreaking debut. Exquisitely recorded (with production by Tchad Blake), beautifully sung and chock full of memorable melodies, it also addresses the current state of the US nation, making it all the more relevant in the light of the New Orleans tragedy. The light strum and airy melody of ‘Change’ belies a much stronger message “…how many losses, how much regret.” On ‘America’, with its insistent beat, she again speaks up for the dispossessed in a hard-hitting indictment of the treatment of poor black Americans by a government who “made us soldiers and junkies, prisoners and slaves.”
In a fairly chilling warning about the breakdown of society, ‘Be And Be Not Afraid’ could have been written in the wake of Katrina: “the nature of life is chaos and confusion / that man’s rules of law and order may not stand.” The lyrical subject matter can make it a tad depressing at times, and the only straight love song ‘Love’s Proof’ softens the overall theme.
But taken in small doses, these songs carry no little power and emotion.