Tracy Chapman

If you don’t feel an immense amount of humility in covering this finely wrought, hand drawn map of human frailty, then you probably wouldn’t even have liked the song in the first place.

truth bomb

yeah I only saw a clip of the Grammy performance but I was moved as hell. And like Alfred, Combs heartfelt looks of admiration towards Chapman struck me as well and hit me hard as a music lover. Sorry for corn. Heart emoji.

I posted this in the Springsteen thread, but I've always loved this clip of Chapman and Springsteen singing "My Hometown."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCYbnLNEPD4

Not crazy about the way “Fast Car” has become a “meme” on social media in the past week; but these are the times we live in…

Fast Car (Bass Boosted)

Something I'd completely forgotten until I got talking with another retired teacher today; we both supply now, both used to work at the same board, and she was telling me that she and her husband are seeing Springsteen in Barcelona in a few months, which led me back--the clip above should have been enough of a reminder--to seeing Chapman in 1988 at Toronto's Maple Leaf Gardens as part of the Amnesty International show with Springsteen, Gabriel, and others. Normally not my kind of thing, but I was seeing a woman at the time who wanted to go.

Springsteen, Sting, Youssou N'Dour, Peter Gabriel, Tracy Chapman and k.d. lang...that's totally a line-up I would go to see if it was 1988. (Even Sting's set is mostly good, leaning heavily on the Police and bringing in Gabriel for a duet on one of his better solo numbers.)

(FWIW, per that article, face value was $30...that's still only $66 today if that's all Canadian dollars.)

Somewhere this week I read that the Amnesty show was a big break for her, last-minute filling in for a big name that had to drop out.

Looks like "Fast Car" did re-enter the Top 100 on Billboard somewhere around #40.

She lives (lived?) by my kids preschool so I'd see her cruising by every once in a while...

on foot, not in a...

fast car.

https://i.postimg.cc/Sxj7WsnT/tracy.jpg

Lol at that sandwiching

I kind of wish the rest of her debut was as starkly produced. The a cappella "Behind the Wall" is also great, but the full-band arrangements for songs like "Mountains o' Things" and "For My Lover" kind of dilute the impact.

It finally occurred to me that her tour supporting her debut was probably what I was hoping for and sure enough there are plenty of bootlegs out there including several soundboard recordings.

In terms of sound quality, this one isn't the best - a cassette dub of a soundboard recording, from the looks of it, it wasn't bootlegged at the correct speed & pitch and this YouTube upload comes from an attempt to correct that. I'm posting here because the second song is unfamiliar and couldn't be identified. The uploader refers to it as "If I Ask You." Is this one of Chapman's unreleased originals or is it a cover?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbFt0MOVHCQ

(It's at 03:23 - for some reason, I wasn't able to post a site-generated link that went to that spot.)

July 1988 shows in Montreux and Philly seem to be the best in terms of audio. Should be easy to find out there in lossless form.