It’s a Saturday evening and I’m at home biting my nails, waiting for Tracy Chapman to call. I have cancelled all my plans for the day so I can prepare for this interview, but even so, it doesn’t feel like enough.
The phone rings, and I clumsily pick it up trying to balance it with my note pad, pen and the recorder.
“Hello there,” says a very calm voice on the other end.
I fumble through my introduction and before she responds to my seemingly endless compliments of her life achievements, I dive into the question about her latest album, Greatest Hits.
“I am feeling great about the album. I am very proud of the fact that I have resisted putting this record out for many years. The record company has requested it on several occasions in the past five years and I kept resisting because I felt it was too soon. Obviously I then agreed to it this year and it came out, and I was happy with it,” she says.
I direct the conversation towards why it took the great singer this long to get this essential album out.
“I am mostly thinking about what I am doing in the moment and what I am going to do. The song that I am working on is the thing I am most I am excited about. I kind of put my energy on the future and the idea of looking back was as exciting. I love the songs and I do go back and listen if I need to prepare for a tour, but instead of sitting down and just listening to them, I play my new material,” she adds.
She then goes on to talk about how she was given the independence to select the songs that would make the cut. All the songs that made it big on radio make up the 18-track album, including a bonus track Stand by Me, done on David Letterman, for his farewell. Chapman then talks about her writing process.
“I have been writing songs since I was eight years old and I also played guitar. I wrote about those things that I cared about and I never really thought to write about social issues or politics. I think my curiosity followed my interests and the things I care about and that’s how I came out with songs like Talking About a Revolution, All That You Have is Your Soul or Subcity. It’s an internal sense of direction that I follow which is attracted to what I am inspired by and the questions I often have. So it leaves me trying to figure something out, or trying to understand an aspect a little better and in the song you simplify the idea for a moment,” she says.
I direct the conversation to Fast Car, a song that first became known to the world at Nelson Mandela’s 70th birthday show in London’s Wembley Stadium in 1988. Mandela was still in jail. But the song became part of his walk to freedom.
“It’s a wonderful feeling. I still marvel at that. To me it’s proof of what activism can do. I think there is reason to believe something like that would happen again, for other causes. People let their voices be heard and things changed. Nelson Mandela was a worldwide inspiration but the process that led to his release is a great reminder of the power of standing up for what you believe,” she says.
It’s time to wrap up and the singer announces that while she is in no rush to release new material, she hopes to visit soon. With that, we bid farewell, and I finally exhale.
Tracy Chapman’s Greatest Hits will be available from Friday.