Tracy Chapman Wants to Speak for Herself

“I haven’t really done press in a long time,” Tracy Chapman said as she settled onto a bench in the courtyard of San Francisco’s stately Fairmont Hotel earlier this week, wearing a black beanie over her pulled-back, gray-flecked dreads.Over the past decade, the singer and songwriter has remained nearly silent, though the past two years have brought renewed fervor for her tenderhearted folk music.In 2023, Luke Combs released a smash cover of her 1988 debut single, “Fast Car,” and the two performed a deeply stirring duet at last year’s Grammys.

Still, Chapman has remained resolutely out of the public eye, passing on interviews about the second life of “Fast Car” and declining to show up at the Country Music Awards, where it took song of the year, making her the first Black woman, and Black songwriter, ever to win a CMA.But Chapman, 61, agreed to this interview because she wants to talk about something she is particularly excited about: the vinyl reissue of her multiplatinum self-titled debut, which arrived on Friday.“This is an opportunity for me to be able to say why I wanted to do this project and what it means to me,” she said, “instead of letting the chatter speak for myself.”Flowers bloomed around her in rich shades of lilac and orange, but Chapman was attired in unobtrusive neutrals: a pale pink button-up under a black zip-up sweater beneath a casual, blazer-like jacket.

(“The key to your comfort is to have layers,” she said of her longtime home city’s fickle climate.) Over an hour, she spoke about the album, and also much more — like that emotional Grammy performance (afterward, she “was weepy for weeks”), her penchant for notebooks (she recommended Roland Allen’s “The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper”), her disinterest in streaming music and the current state of that elusive shadow her best songs have always chased: the American dream.For a figure who has become better known for her reserve than her public ...