Tracy Chapman: New Beginning?

There's no use pretending when you can't connect with an artist or her audience -- and that's just where I ended up last Sunday night at Tracy Chapman's sold-out Harborlights show. Chapman, you may have noticed, is back, eight years after "Fast Car" catapulted sales of her homonynous album debut to 10 million copies worldwide. Her sophomore release, Crossroads (1989), sold a "disappointing" five million, and things being what they are for superstar former Harvard Square buskers, Chapman was no longer considered a contender by the time her most recent album, New Beginning (all her releases are on Elektra), hit the stores last November. But surprise, after months of heavy play on Triple A radio of her original blues "Give Me One Reason" (written in 1986), the album has climbed into the Top 10 of the Billboard 200 album chart and is now officially double platinum.

Yes, I know, I hate horse-race talk about art too, but go figure. At her worst, Chapman delivers feel-good political platitudes by the Bread & Circus truckload. At Harborlights, "Why?" (from the first album) solemnly asked "Why do babies starve?" and "Who will feed the world?", then inexplicably broke into a funk groove ("The starving-baby boogie?" a friend of mine suggested) while the audience shimmied along. At her best, Chapman has an alto voice as wide as it is deep, and when she turns her pen to domestic relationships (as she does on "Give Me One Reason") she can be as affecting as she is sincere. She gave "Fast Car" (a story about the relentless cycle of domestic strife) an arrangement that began slowly, accumulating perceptions with each verse, finding the release of self-discovery in the chorus line "I had a feeling I could be someone."

Unlike much of Chapman's material, "Fast Car" also successfully mates the political and the personal, in part because of its focus on particulars and its first-person point of view. Sunday night she also sang, a cappella, "Behind the Wall," another tale of domestic abuse, and this too focused on the details of a character's life. The song blames ineffectual cops (they "always come late if they come at all"), but it also implicates the narrator and, by extension, the rest of us for not taking responsibility for a social ill.

All well and good -- I was happy to suck up my liberal guilt along with my Starbucks frappacino (those things are good), and so was the rest of the crowd: predominantly white, college girls with dates, lesbian couples, most in conventional suburbanite attire, only a few in peasant dresses or otherwise. Deadly garb, and no grunge kids in baggies, flannels, tattoos and Docs, puh-lease. But why in the middle of "Behind the Wall," with a dramatic hush settled on the crowd, did some over-pumped lad howl like a banshee? And why were kids dancing at their seats one minute, rushing for the concession stand the next? Call it the price of success.

Chapman's back-up was tight, if somnolent for the concert's first half (she performed for nearly two and a half hours). She took a break for virtually her only stage banter in order to introduce the band and read comment cards from the audience (everything from "Shut down the CIA -- no more covert action" to "When the student is ready, the teacher will appear," "Celebrate diversity," and "Gum is just flavor for your spit"). She asked the audience to vote regularly and check out the Greenpeace concession. In the second half, the concert rocked (with fine solos from guitarist Linda Taylor), and the encores included not only Chapman's "Talkin' 'Bout a Revolution" but Al Green's "Take Me to the River" and an "Amazing Grace" that built into a glorious gospel finish. At that point it was difficult not to be a believer.

-- Jon Garelick