One might assume that an album titled Our Bright Future by one of the foremost African-American singer-songwriters contemporary pop music of the past few decades, released a week after the first African-American president was elected to office, would be a rather optimistic and uplifting affair. The hitch in that assumption is that albums are, of course, generally written and recorded well before they reach the public’s ears.
Indeed, the copyright dates on the lyrics in the liner notes here reveal that Tracy Chapman wrote most of these songs in 2007. And so, the title track to Our Bright Future isn’t a celebration of Barack Obama’s rise, but rather a mourning of what was lost during wartime soldiers “sent out to martyr, to face the gun/Precious bodies opposed to bombs,” Chapman sings. “Led on to take the path/Where our bright future is in our past.”
(The title track to Tracy Chapman’s new disc Our Bright Future)
One wonders what the most current events may inspire next time around for Chapman, who has been perhaps the most socially observant songwriter of her generation since the improbable runaway success of her first single, the indelible “Fast Car”, in 1988. Our Bright Future finds Chapman in a familiar element, blending the political with the personal in carefully arranged folk-pop compositions. Co-producing (with Chapman) is Larry Klein, who was there at the beginning of her career; he played bass on her self-titled debut and its 1989 follow-up Crossroads.
Stylistically, there are no major turns here, and that’s no surprise; “steady” seems the operative word for Chapman’s oeuvre. In twenty years, she has released eight albums, roughly one every two or three years, and they’re all pretty much of a piece with each other. Post-“Fast Car”, the breakthroughs have been rare, though she returned to the upper reaches of the singles charts with “Give Me One Reason”, from 1995’s New Beginnings. Chapman isn’t often cited these days as being influential, but you could argue that she laid some groundwork for the mass-acceptance of Norah Jones. (In fact, jazz guitarist Adam Levy had worked with Chapman before appearing on Jones’ 2002 debut.)
In the end, Chapman’s records rise or fall on the strength of the songs they contain, and Our Bright Future does a bit of both. The title track is depressive but effective, a plea to a higher power “to be at peace in our true nature.” The album’s most instantly arresting number is “I Did It All”, which comes across like the epitaph of a hard-living celebrity; it’s not likely autobiographical, as Chapman has generally kept her private life low-key and well-guarded. Rather, the song shows how well Chapman can inhabit a character when she writes; the same is true for the sterling leadoff track, “Sing For You”, a beautiful memoir from a mother to a child.
Those highlights are loaded toward the front, which leaves the disc dragging a bit as it wears on. Though the penultimate track “The First Person On Earth” and the gentle closer “Spring” feel more inspired, too much of the midsection drifts by without taking hold. At times her lyrics feel clumsy (“A particular set of assumptions” in “A Theory”; “To curse every nerve and neuron in my brain” in “Thinking Of You”), and while the music (anchored by such aces as drummer Joey Waronker, keyboardist Rob Berger, and multi-instrumentalist) is consistently elegant, it’s rarely compelling.
A curious detail about Chapman’s eight albums is that not one of them has included even a single cover. This seems an oversight, in part because she has such a distinctive voice, and such good taste in arrangements, that she’d likely be a terrific interpreter of outside material (in much the same way the aforementioned Norah Jones has proven to be). It’s no sin for songwriters to rely on the works of others from time to time; often they can serve not only as a valuable addition to an album-length presentation, but also as a further window into the artist’s own work, and even as a creative spark toward fresh original material. Giving it a shot next time around just might help keep Chapman headed toward her own bright future.
