Talking with Grammy winner Tracy Chapman: ‘Fast Car’ legend’s music was forged in Cleveland

CLEVELAND, Ohio — Cleveland native Tracy Chapman stole the show at Sunday night’s Grammy Awards, making a surprise appearance to sing her 1988 hit, “Fast Car,” in a duet with Luke Combs. whose cover of the song became a No. 1 country hit last year. The tender, elegant performance was a highlight of the evening and a hit among the many celebrities in attendance, including Taylor Swift, who could be seen standing in the crowd singing along to every word.

The reaction seemed to catch Chapman off guard, particularly the roar when she played the song’s opening guitar riff. She teared up and smiled as she and Combs performed the iconic tune. They received a standing ovation from the celebrity crowd afterward.

It was a special, full-circle moment for Chapman. The 59-year-old singer-songwriter won multiple Grammy Awards in 1989, including Best New Artist. “Fast Car” won the award for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance that year and and her self-titled debut album, “Tracy Chapman,” won for Best Contemporary Folk Album.

Chapman went on to have a successful career in music. Though “Fast Car” is her best-known song, it isn’t her only charting single and wasn’t even her biggest hit. That honor belongs to “Give Me One Reason,” from her 1995 “New Beginning” album, which won the 1997 Grammy for Best Rock Song.

Related: How Cleveland’s Tracy Chapman became country music’s first time-traveling Black superstar

But the reclusive Chapman hasn’t released an album of new songs since “Our Bright Future” 15 years ago and hasn’t toured since 2009. Her last public performance was a 2020 appearance on “Late Night with Seth Myers.”

She also hasn’t talked much with the media over the years, particularly about her early years in Cleveland. But she did speak with The Plain Dealer in 1992 to promote a concert she was about to give at the Palace Theater at Playhouse Square.

Here is that interview, published in The Plain Dealer on May 24, 1992.

Change is what matters – in Tracy Chapman’s heart

By Michael Norman, Plain Dealer Music Critic

When Cleveland native Tracy Chapman is asked whether she feels any pressure to duplicate the commercial and critical success of her first album, 1988′s Grammy Award-winning “Tracy Chapman,” the answer is swift and unequivocal. “I don’t. My approach today is very similar to the approach I took to the first album. I was as surprised as most people by the success of the first album. But I haven’t felt any pressure to try to be more popular or more pop or have more sales.”

Chapman was talking by phone from a theater in San Francisco, where she was rehearsing for a U.S. tour to support her new album, “Matters of the Heart.” The tour, which kicked off last Wednesday in Rock Island, Ill., stops at the Palace Theater on Wednesday.

Aside from Farm Aid and a few other benefit concerts, this is first time Chapman has hit the road since a 1989 tour to support her second album, “Crossroads.”

That album was a commercial disappointment, especially in light of the multiplatinum sales of “Tracy Chapman.” But Chapman says she doesn’t let the marketplace or the pop charts affect the way she writes songs.

“It made me think about something that had been said to me when I was in high school,” she says. “I received my first real guitar, a normal-size guitar with reasonable action, because the chaplain at the school took up a collection amongst the teachers and the employees.

“He had loaned me a guitar and some other students had loaned me guitars. But people kept saying I needed to have my own. I didn’t have the money. My mother didn’t have the money to buy me a nice guitar.

“One day, the chaplain asked me to come see him. I thought, `What have I done? What is going on?’ And he presented me with the check for the guitar. And I was really overwhelmed, very touched by the whole thing. I think the first thing I said was, `There is no way I can pay anyone back. I don’t have the money. And I don’t know when I will have the money.’ “And he said, `Everyone just wants you to keep doing what you do. Just keep playing and keep writing songs. That’s all that you owe them.’

“I guess that sort of stuck with me. These people believed in me enough to make an investment in me of sorts, and they were also willing to encourage me to be myself. That’s the way I look at it when I write and I make records.” “Matters of the Heart” is vintage Chapman, a mix of melodic, socially conscious folk that addresses racism, sexism, poverty and homelessness.

In “Dreaming on a World” she surveys decay, violence, homelessness and poverty in the inner city, but sees reason for hope and optimism. The song was written before the Los Angeles riots. But Chapman says the violence and racial hatred stirred up by those events haven’t changed her view.

“If anything, it makes me think it’s even more … important to have some hope and dreams,” she says. “There are a lot of people who want to describe what occurred in Los Angeles as just lawless, unfounded behavior. I don’t see it that way.

“They can’t find a way to make a living and live productive lives. And when you have nothing, you have nothing to lose,” she says. “In the face of recent events and thinking about that song, it’s even more important that we can believe there is a chance, a possibility for positive change.”

Part of what Chapman wants to accomplish as an artist is to give voice to people who might not otherwise be represented in the national debate. She shines the light on issues and stirs debate with her words and music.

“I think that I provide a perspective in the pop music scene that for the most part isn’t provided by anyone else,” she says. “That’s changed to some extent, with rap music. But rap music is mostly predominated by black men.”

Where rap sometimes bludgeons the listener with the message, Chapman relies more on introspection, metaphor and nuance to get her point across.

In the song “If These Are the Things” from “Matters of the Heart,” she poses a double-edged question about the definition of a success. On one level, the song is a personal statement, Chapman re-evaluating herself in the aftermath of her celebrity to “see whether or not I’m doing my best.”

But on another level, the lyrics are universal. “When I wrote the song, it was actually around the time the United States entered into the Persian Gulf War,” she says. “I was wondering, `What does it really mean to be an American?’ I was questioning our involvement in the war and our motives.

Like Chapman’s previous two albums, “Matters of the Heart” includes songs about her personal relationships with friends, lovers and her family.

Tracy Chapman performs at the Paleo Festival Music Open Air in Nyon, Switzerland, Friday July 21, 2006. (AP Photo/Keystone, Martial Trezzini)ASSOCIATED PRESS

“Woman’s Work,” a short, stark song about the never-ending cycle of work and responsibility borne by single mothers, is dedicated to her mother, Hazel Chapman, who lives in Cleveland.

Hazel Chapman was divorced when Tracy and her sister, Aneta, were toddlers. The family lived in a black working-class neighborhood on Cleveland’s East Side. Hazel Chapman worked a series of jobs to support her children, but found time to expose them to Cleveland’s cultural offerings: the museums, operas and concerts. She also gave them a deep appreciation for music; Tracy started playing the ukulele when she was 3 and enrolled for guitar and clarinet lessons at the Cleveland Music School Settlement when she was 7.

The song is a tribute to her mother, Chapman says. “She worked hard. She worked as a dental assistant. She worked as a secretary. She worked in a sticker factory. She worked in a rubber plant.” Tracy left Cleveland at 14 on a scholarship to attend the exclusive Wooster Preparatory School in Danbury, Conn. She had been attending Albert Bushnell Hart Junior High School.

“As I recall, they were just starting to implement desegregation,” Chapman says. “And there was a lot of controversy, as well as teachers’ strikes going on. It seemed to me, and my mother eventually agreed, that it would be better for my education if I was able to go somewhere where there wasn’t so much controversy.” Her early experiences in Cleveland have influenced her songwriting. The racial segregation of Greater Cleveland’s neighborhoods provided the inspiration for “Across the Lines,” a song from her first album about the geographical barriers that often separate whites from blacks. “There was this one route that I would take going home from school that sort of passed through neighborhoods – from a predominantly white neighborhood to a predominantly black neighborhoood,” she says. “And there was a bridge and railroad tracks and that sort of thing separating them.”

Chapman also was the victim of a racially motivated assault while she was in junior high school in Cleveland. She was walking home from school with several friends when a white boy shouted racial epithets at her. “I had a very nice mouth for a teen-ager,” she says. “I told him to (expletive) off. I just kept walking and he then attacked me. We tussled back and forth.

“Then he reached in his boot and he pulled out a gun. And he told me to run or he’d shoot. All my friends disappeared. I don’t know, I can’t remember exactly what was going through my mind. But I did think that if I ran, he would shoot me, so I didn’t. His friends finally called him and he backed down.”

The incident wasn’t the first time Chapman had been subjected to racially motivated abuse. “It was a common occurrence depending on what neighborhood you were in, or in certain types of neighborhoods to be called various names or to have racial slurs directed at you.”

The politics and sociology of race and poverty resonate in Chapman’s work. But they do not rule it. In addition to several deeply personal love songs (including the seven-minute title track to “Matters of the Heart”), the new album finds her experimenting with beefed-up arrangements and world-beat rhythms.

“It was an approach I came to independently,” she says. “When we recorded the basic tracks for the album we recorded it with two percussionists with myself and the other musicians. A lot of it is really based on my guitar parts. Jimmy Iovine, who co-produced the album with me, said before we recorded this that he could often hear the bass line as well as the rhythm in my guitar playing. He was saying it in a positive way, but it frustrated him. So a lot of the drum tracks are based on the guitar playing, especially on songs like `Turning on the World.’

Chapman says she was influenced by her experience in a world-beat drum ensemble in college. “I didn’t take any rhythms from the pieces that we learned to play but I think it affected my rhythmic sensibility.”

“Matters of the Heart” features a fine crew of backing musicians and vocalists, including the legendary soul man Bobby Womack of Cleveland, Living Colour’s Vernon Reid, E Street Band keyboardist Roy Bittan and Tom Petty’s guitarist Mike Campbell.

For the tour, Chapman has assembled what she calls an equally great group of musicians, including drummer Rock Deadrick, guitarist Larry Mitchell, keyboardist John Thomas, percussionist Steve Thornton and bassist Steve Sklar.