ELEKTRA/RHINO RECORDS TO REISSUE
TRACY CHAPMAN’S EPONYMOUS 1988 DEBUT ALBUM
ON VINYL ON APRIL 4, 2025 IN CELEBRATION OF ITS 35TH ANNIVERSARY
‘We’ve witnessed the worst this world can throw our way, Chapman suggests on her debut. But the album creates a world where no force exists without a counter. The worst of what we’ve endured, she also offers, makes righteous justice inevitable. It’s a worldview that many could tune into. By the end of the summer of 1988, a few months after the Nelson Mandela tribute, Tracy Chapman was a platinum album and the singer was a star. Chapman came to the world stage with a perspective crystallized in society’s margins. Yet, for all the violence and hopelessness Chapman captures in her lyrics, there’s an equal measure of radical and naive conviction that a more just world is on its way. The album was produced in isolation from popular music, and in defiance of it. She wasn’t a herald of change within the industry so much as she was an example of the innovation to be found outside of it.’ – Pitchfork [January 2019]
On April 4, 2025, Elektra/Rhino Records will reissue Tracy Chapman’s eponymous debut album on vinyl in celebration of its 35th anniversary. Originally released by Elektra Records in April 1988, Tracy Chapman has long been unavailable on vinyl. This anniversary reissue has been prepared for release by Chapman and the album’s original producer, David Kershenbaum, pressed on 180-gram vinyl and sourced from an analogue master. The album package will also include an insert of translated lyrics, which accompanied the original international release. Featuring the classic singles ‘Fast Car’, ‘Talkin’ Bout A Revolution’, and ‘Baby Can I Hold You’, the album earned three Grammy Awards and went on to become one of the most successful debuts of all time, peaking at #1 in multiple countries and selling more than 20 million copies worldwide. To this day, it still makes regular appearances on charts around the world, and is one of the most successful albums by a female artist in chart history.
Chapman comments, “I was just out of college when the album came out and for a young singer songwriter it was a dream come true – making a record, recording my own songs, releasing my first album. 1988, that year marked the beginning of what has been a humbling and thrilling experience, seeing fans around the world embrace these 11 songs. I really wanted to mark the 35th anniversary of the album, and so I am grateful to have this opportunity to reissue the record on vinyl.”
At the time of its original release, Rolling Stone wrote, ‘The production is subtle and streamlined, focused unyieldingly on Chapman’s acoustic guitar, her bluesy voice and her carefully wrought tales of characters in contemporary America who seek meaning in the face of society’s fragmentation. Chapman is equally direct about her political beliefs: ‘Poor people gonna rise up/And get their share/Poor people gonna rise up/And take what’s theirs,’ she insists on ‘Talkin’ Bout A Revolution’. Sentiments like these have led critics to view Chapman as a bridge between the Eighties folk revival and the more socially conscious folk movement of the Sixties. What Chapman has going for her is the sheer musicality of her songs and the expressive power of her voice.’ She ended 1988 being named Rolling Stone’s Best New Artist, and in 2021 the album was included in its list of Greatest Albums of All Time, and in 2024 ‘Fast Car’ was included in its list of 100 Greatest Songs of All Time.
Over the course of four decades and eight studio albums, Tracy Chapman has created a body of work that has been as consistently compelling as it is honest and uncompromising, eloquently telling stories with perennial appeal that are at once personal and universal. Impervious to trends, she has commendably stayed her musical course, earning the approbation of fans, critics and peers. Beginning with 1988’s multi-platinum Tracy Chapman, her musical journey has continued with Crossroads (1989), Matters Of The Heart (1992), 1995’s multi-platinum New Beginning (which featured the Grammy-winning single ‘Give Me One Reason’), Telling Stories (2000), Let It Rain (2002), Where You Live (2005), Our Bright Future (2008), and two best-selling compilations, Collection (2001) and Greatest Hits (2015). Along the way, in addition to her four Grammys, Chapman has earned an American Music Award, two Brits, and a Billboard Music Award.
Born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, Chapman was awarded an academic scholarship to the prestigious Wooster School in Danbury, Connecticut, and later attended Tufts University, where she received a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology (in 2004 she received an honorary doctorate in fine arts from her alma mater). It was while she was there, in the Boston area, in the late 1980s that she began singing in coffee houses, night clubs and street performing around Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Chapman made her breakthrough performance at Nelson Mandela’s 70th birthday concert in London in 1988. In the words of the Guardian, ‘It was during the height of the era of fast-buck capitalism, at a televised concert celebrating Mandela’s birthday, that Chapman came out of nowhere and enthralled the world with her songs about social injustice. Just her, an acoustic guitar and a hushed Wembley Stadium.’ Since then, she has appeared frequently in support of social and humanitarian causes, including Amnesty International’s Human Rights Now! Tour, the annual Bridge School benefit concerts, the Nelson Mandela Free South Africa Concert, Farm Aid, Tibetan Freedom Festival, Vote for Change, the Driving Votes tour, San Francisco AIDS Foundation, and many others. Chapman made her theater debut composing the music for a new production of Athol Fugard’s classic 1961 play Blood Knot, which opened at San Francisco’s A.C.T. in 2008, and was directed by Charles Randolph-Wright. In 2012, Chapman performed at the 35th annual Kennedy Center Honors as part of the Buddy Guy tribute. In 2014, she sat on the domestic documentary jury at the Sundance Film Festival. In 2015, she was invited by David Letterman to sing ‘Stand By Me’ during his final season hosting The Late Show, commanding a stage entirely on her own for an emotional performance of a classic song. In November 2020, the night before the US federal elections, Chapman performed ‘Talkin’ Bout A Revolution’ on NBC’s Late Night With Seth Myers to encourage voter participation.
In February 2024, Chapman made a surprise appearance at the 66th Grammy Awards, collaborating with country superstar Luke Combs for an unforgettable duet of ‘Fast Car’. The performance was historic, representing a moment of confluence, coming 35 years to the month since Chapman first performed ‘Fast Car’ at the Grammys and after a year of unprecedented success for Combs with the song. Introduced to a new audience, ‘Fast Car’ achieved new chart peaks across genres (including #1 on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs and #2 on the Hot 100), and won two awards at the 2023 CMA Awards (notably Song of the Year for Chapman, who made history as the first Black songwriter to win in the category). Following the Grammy performance, Chapman’s original version re-entered charts around the world (including the Hot 100), as did her debut album. The New York Times wrote, ‘The song felt incredibly spacious – larger than the limitations of genre, welcoming and expansive enough to hold every single person it had ever touched, regardless of the markers of identity that so often divide us. It was a rare reminder of music’s unique ability to obliterate external differences. ‘Fast Car’ is about something more internal and universal. It is a song about the wants and needs that make us human: the desire to be happy, to be loved, to be free.’
By the end of the year, the Grammy performance had made Google’s top 5 trending songs as part of its Year in Search 2024, and ‘Fast Car’ recently entered Spotify’s Billions Club. The performance also topped the New Yorker’s list of Best Performances of 2024, where it was described as “Five and a half blissful minutes. Chapman was back, her voice as lucid and knowing as ever. Combs gazed at her with fanboy reverence as they traded lyrics that told a poignant story. The duet gave the impression – as fleeting as that joyride in the fast car – that one great song could bridge America’s divisions.”
Side One
- Talkin’ Bout A Revolution (2:38)
- Fast Car (4:58)
- Across The Lines (3:22)
- Behind The Wall (1:46)
- Baby Can I Hold You (3:16)
Side Two
- Mountains O’ Things (4:37)
- She’s Got Her Ticket (3:54)
- Why? (2:01)
- For My Lover (3:15)
- If Not Now… (2:55)
- For You (3:09)
Words and music by Tracy Chapman
Produced by David Kershenbaum for SBK Record Productions Inc.
Executive producers: Don Rubin and Brian Koppelman
Engineered and mixed by Kevin W. Smith
Recorded and mixed at POWERTRAX, Hollywood, CA
Mastered at Masterdisk
Art direction: Carol Bobolts
Photography: Matt Mahurin
Musicians: Tracy Chapman, Ed Black, Paulinho Da Costa, Denny Fongheiser, Jack Holder, Steve Kaplan, Larry Klein, David LaFlamme, Bob Marlette
Reissue produced for release by Tracy Chapman and David Kershenbaum
Vinyl reissue mastered by Bernie Grundman at Bernie Grundman Mastering
Project support: Karina Beznicki, David Bither, Maya Bouvier-Lyons, Joseph Cacciola, Andrew Campbell, Teri Eastwood Molls, Lisa Glines, Lauren Papapietro, Matthew Rankin, Rory Wilson