Tracy Chapman: Tracy Chapman : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Suzanne Vega was only the tip of the iceberg. Vega hauled the female-singer-songwriter genre into the Eighties, sold records, even got on the radio and on MTV. She was successful because she made smart music, not because she looked good in a miniskirt or sold herself in shopping malls or had a smart man in the shadows. But you could still pigeonhole her: you know, another sensitive, poetic girl singer. So now it's time to go further, to make this much-maligned form tougher and more soulful and grittier and more real – it's time, in short, to bring things into the Nineties. And that's where Tracy Chapman and Toni Childs come in.

There are substantial differences between the two. One is a tough-minded Easterner, the other a Southern California dreamer. But there are also similarities. Both are authoritative, individual personalities, songwriters who have a point to make and singers who've figured out how to give those points a voice. Both have the potential to be what Joan Armatrading has often threatened to be but has never quite been: a forthright woman with a feel for modern urban music and the guts and talent to force herself into the pop mainstream.

Childs is the Californian, the dreamer. You notice her voice first: it's full, deep and flexible, and she often somehow manages to make it throaty and breathy at the same time. Her voice is her album's commanding centerpiece, surrounded by layers of keyboards, backing vocals and percussive effects. Like David and David's album Boomtown (that duo's David Ricketts is Childs's associate producer), this is a lavishly arranged album that would sound slick if the arrangements weren't so intelligently constructed, so marvelously atmospheric.

That atmosphere fits in perfectly with Childs's lyrics, which tend to be elusive and impressionistic: if her songs are hard to pin down and sum up, you could say the same for the emotions about which she usually writes. As the title suggests, Union is an album about the precarious dynamic between men and women, an album full of first-person songs about losing love, finding love, remembering love. And though the opening song, the brassy "Don't Walk Away," confronts a departing companion who's "ripping out the root of love," the album is suffused with a sense of peace and restfulness: by the end of side one's closer, "Let the Rain Come Down," Childs sounds downright triumphant, buoyed by her faith in the renewal that comes with time and distance and a cleansing rain.

"Let the Rain Come Down" is typical of Union in the way Childs's voice rides the grooves she has crafted with Ricketts and producer David Tickle – and in the way she paints an emotional landscape by looking to the physical world around her. At times the lavish arrangements only serve to obscure the fact that some of these songs are lushly framed sketches rather than worthy compositions, but on most of the record – especially on "Let the Rain Come Down," "Walk and Talk Like Angels" and the gorgeous "Where's the Ocean" – Childs delivers what Van Morrison did in his finest moments: evocative, evanescent music that allows you to immerse yourself and drift away.

Tracy Chapman is something else altogether. Confrontational rather than confessional, pointed rather than poetic, hers is the sound of a smart black woman growing up in the city with her eyes wide open. "The police always come late," she sings bluntly, without a shred of music to back her, "if they come at all."

Chapman's melodies are wandering and slippery, and she sings them with unexpected phrasings that often call to mind a throatier, deeper-voiced Joni Mitchell. Most of the tracks are modern folk songs, and producer David Kershenbaum frames them in ways that never lose sight of that fact. He never lets you forget that this is Chapman's story and Chapman's sensibility.

Her sound is not wholly new, but at its best it feels that way, because modern pop – as opposed to folk, a genre far too restrictive for Chapman – rarely accommodates women who sing with this much open political anger. Tracy Chapman is a mixture of defiantly optimistic, big-scale political statements ("Talkin' bout a Revolution," "Why?") and grim, knowing urban stories ("Fast Car," "Behind the Wall"). At the heart of the blunt realism, though, is a deliberate naiveté. In the inspiring, heartbreaking "Fast Car," for instance, she vividly and succinctly sketches a dead-end inner-city life, then dares to let her narrator imagine escaping: "I know things will get better/I had a feeling I could be someone."

She makes you believe those desperately optimistic lines. And both Tracy Chapman and Union make you believe that these two young singer-songwriters can become successors not only to Suzanne Vega and Joni Mitchell but to Sting and Bruce Springsteen as well. These women have the power.