Tracy Chapman: Matters of the Heart : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

When Tracy Chapman became a pop sensation nearly four years ago with "Fast Car," the music world held its breath. Was it possible that a singer-songwriter with the vision and moral authority of the young Bob Dylan had finally arrived to rekindle folk rock's flame?

Four years and two albums later, the promise augured by "Fast Car" is still on hold. Chapman's second album, Crossroads, and her brand-new third album, Matters of the Heart, are not bad records, but in the light of "Fast Car" and a couple of the other vignettes on her first album, they are terribly mundane. Matters of the Heart is somewhat weaker than Crossroads, with most of its ten songs mimicking the simplistic vocabulary of generic Sixties folk-pop anthems. And Jimmy Iovine, who produced the new album, shows little of the sensitivity to instrumental detail and vocal intimacy exhibited by David Kershenbaum on Chapman's first two records.

The album's hardest-hitting message song, "Bang Bang Bang," sermonizes about the consequences of guns in the hands of teenage boys, but it doesn't tell a story or build to any point except to warn, "We'll all be at his mercy/If he decides to hunt us down." Chapman's grim, grainy vocal, however, does manage to wrest some power out of a vague, singsongy lyric. Generalities turn into doggerel ("Where are all the sandy beaches/Fishes in the sea") in her environmental protest song "Short Supply." Just as fatuous is the hopeful "Dreaming on a World," in which she sings of tossing coins in fountains and looking for clovers in grassy lawns.

The public versifier gives way to a more vulnerable supplicant in the album's love songs, which have some scattered idiosyncratic images. "If These Are the Things" compares a ruined romantic dream to a nightmare about picking fruit and finding it rotten. And the album's calypso-flavored title song describes an ambiguous relationship that is tearing Chapman apart: "If today were my birthday/I'd be reborn/As Brontë's bird, a bird that could fly."

Matters of the Heart finds Chapman in a place one could hardly have predicted at the time of her debut. The broadsides all sound like forced exercises in folkie rhetoric, only partly redeemed by the power of her voice. It is in her shaky, agitated love songs that she shows the most promise and seems to be the most herself.