Day Twenty-Three - Let It Rain

“Give me hope that help is coming

  when I need it most”

You can hear an audio version of this post here.

Today’s song is Let It Rain by Tracy Chapman. It’s on her 2002 album, also called Let It Rain. Hear the song here.

Straightaway let’s get one thing clear, no, Tracy Chapman did not pop in to Montrose Folk Club one sleepy Tuesday in February (wouldn’t it have been great though, if she had?). And that means that yes, this is one of the times when I am stretching the guidelines for this project a little. In my defence I did say back in June last year that I might stray into ‘big hitter’ songwriting territory now and again, and here I am doing this by picking a Tracy Chapman* song. I feel I should say that I am calling most of the songwriters by just their first names throughout the posts, as surnames seem so formal when repeated over and over, but somehow just calling Tracy Chapman ‘Tracy’ seems wildly overfamiliar so I won’t be doing that.

One reason I’ve picked this song is that there is a link, if a tenuous one, between this singer-songwriter and my folk club attendance (2004-18). That link is the floor spots (what people in other areas of the arts might call the open mic part of the night) because I have a strong memory of one of our irregular floor spotters singing a Tracy Chapman song at the club. Charlie Williamson was always one of my favourite local singers in Montrose. Later he started playing guitar as well but when I first heard him he always sang unaccompanied – a glorious voice in a Bothy Ballad style that he used on all sorts of unexpected material. The regular floor spotters in my early years at the club tended to play Scottish traditional songs and songs by mainly North American folk/country/blues greats from the early-mid twentieth century (mostly these were artists I had barely heard of at that point). All of what they sang was interesting but quite often it did involve people singing about things they didn’t really know and jobs they hadn’t really done (like whaling and working in the fields) and I did sometimes wonder what they would sing if they ever sang about own lives. Whilst I understand the importance of keeping traditional songs and history in our minds*, I’d have to be honest and say it was Charlie’s mixed-up approach (old-fashioned style and much newer songs) that really caught my ears. He did sing some traditional Scots songs but he often tried new things as well (pop songs, more recent North American songs). As an example, when I got him to come and sing at a poetry and music event that I organised in Edinburgh in 2008, he sang an unaccompanied, totally East Coast Scotland bothy ballad version of Rihanna’s Umbrella. It was fantastic. 

The song of Tracy Chapman’s he sang one night at folk club was Behind the Wall (from 1988’s album Tracy Chapman). It’s a pretty tough listen at any time but sat in the dim Tuesday evening light of that hotel function room, with Charlie, as in her original version, singing unaccompanied, it was very moving. There are guys who sing songs like that and you feel they want a pat on the back (‘well done you, for caring’) but Charlie was never like that. I think that’s the only time I heard a song by Tracy Chapman at the club (and, in contrast, I lost track of how many Bob Dylan songs I heard over the years). 

Chapman is a very interesting artist (with a huge talent) and she is much loved (read a recent fan piece here). She could have had the megafame no doubt (she had a taste of it with the first album I suppose) but instead, perhaps sensibly, she has kept pretty private. She’s not, for example, on social media (and look how fabulous and thoughtful she is on this clip on ‘smartphones’) and I didn’t even try to get answers from her to the questions I’ve been sending out to the songwriters this month (to be honest I wouldn’t know where to start, there isn’t even much of website). So instead I just thought I would talk about this particular album (2002’s Let It Rain) and encourage you to have a listen to it if you don’t already know it. Every track on it is a winner and deserves your attention and it reminds us once again that she is a beautiful, sensitive singer and a supremely talented songwriter. You rarely hear her music given a genre category (beyond ‘singer-songwriter’ or maybe, for the first album in particular, ‘political singer-songwriter’) and I suppose that’s partly because once you reach a certain level of fame, genre becomes less important. Instead of ‘where shall we put this in the racks?’ you’re just ‘Nina Simone’ or ‘Bruce Springsteen’ or ‘David Bowie’ (and people will find you whatever rack you’re in, because in some cases they are driven to find every recording you’ve ever released). We understand who these stars are because we have heard so much by them and accept all the many sounds they are capable of (even if we often have favourite eras for them). Tracy Chapman has a pretty distinctive voice so her music is, to an extent, just her music.

That first album Tracy Chapman from 1988 is the source of most of the songs of hers that people generally know best (Fast Car, Talkin’ ‘bout a Revolution and Baby Can I Hold You). Such is the appeal of those three songs that they have never really gone away and they have put Tracy Chapmen well and truly into the singer-songwriter hall of fame. Of course, she didn’t stop there – she was only 24 when that first album came out and she’s put out seven more studio albums since then. None of these are as well-known as the first one and that’s partly why I wanted to write about this song (and album) today. Every track on the Let It Rain is brilliant and I think the album has been a bit overlooked. It did sell when it was released (60,000 in the UK, for context the debut album sold over 2.5 million copies) but I don’t remember ever hearing tracks from it anywhere but my own library.

I can’t remember exactly when I bought the CD of Let it Rain but I’ve the feeling it was in the music shop Fopp in Dundee in something like 2006 (there are a couple of Fopp stores still open, I think, but the Dundee one shut years ago). I do wish I had the tour edition of the CD because I see online that it has extra live tracks (You're the One, Give Me One Reason, Talkin' 'bout a Revolution, I Am Yours and Bob Marley’s Get up, Stand up) but I just have the ordinary release. Also I’d have to admit I didn’t know his name before doing this piece but the co-producer (with Chapman) was John Parish (who has worked with P J Harvey a good deal and has quite the CV of his own). He plays on the album too. 

The title track is a good introduction to the mood of the album. The whole thing is a gentle, reassuring, hopeful piece of work and I think that’s a good part of what’s kept me listening to it over the years. It is one of the few albums in my phone library (not on Spotify or Bandcamp or anything just my plain old library) and I often listen to it when I can’t sleep** (not that uncommon). It’s not that the songs put you to sleep (not at all) but just that the whole album is perfect middle of the night music (it even has a song called In the Dark). The final track I’m Yours is gorgeous and the track called Goodbye, confusingly for the sleep-deprived, is not the final track but is still a perfect thing (in fact if I did this list again I might even go for that one as today’s song of choice). The album is not all downtempo (You’re the One for Me – is literally a happy-clappy number and can turn a dismal 2am quite cheerful). There are also claps and raising of hands and voices on Say Hallelujah and Hard Wired is no slouch either. In a Guardian interview at the time of this album’s release (2002), the journalist Gary Younge wrote “the overriding impression of this album is more spiritual” but then added, “It is a distinction that Chapman does not herself acknowledge. ‘This record has lots of contemporary issues,’ she says. ‘The first record is seen as being more social commentary... more political. But I think that's just all about perspective.’” 

Perhaps another reason the album works so well at home (in the dark, in bed) is that it comes from her home to ours. Younge obviously had to drag the interview out of her (it’s not her favourite way to spend her time, to say the least) but it’s worth it for some of the details. He wrote: “The security of domesticity, along with a few home improvements - she recently had a studio built in her house - may have contributed to the more spiritual feel of the album, she says. ‘A lot of these songs started to develop in my house. It's the first time I've ever had a dedicated space in my house for making music. It gave me a lot of freedom to work on things and work out ideas. Maybe coming out of a completely intimate environment like that, some of it translated to the record.’”

So, from my insomnia*** to yours, friends and readers, I suggest you Let it Rain. Then Let It Rain again.

*Though I’ve come to appreciate them more over time, in my early days at the folk club (2004-6) I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to sing all this funny old stuff when they could be trying something more exciting. After a 2005 show in Montrose with the English duo Spiers and Boden as guests, I helpfully informed a bemused John Spiers that I preferred the original material he’d performed to the traditional. Now I know a little more about him, I realise that was probably not the audience reaction he was most interested in. 

**Other favourite can’t-sleep albums:

• Sufjan Stevens’ Carrie and Lowell (this one makes me cry but I find lying in bed crying your eyes out is an underrated pastime).

• Johnny Dickinson’s English Summer (see Day 11).

• The Into the Wild soundtrack by Eddie Vedder (a big family favourite album).

• Spell Songs (both albums)

• Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life (other Stevie Wonder will also be considered).

• The Magnolia soundtrack featuring a whole lot of Aimee Mann.

• Time (The Revelator) by Gillian Welch (the last track I Dream a Highway is over 14 minutes long and can do the trick of finally getting you off to sleep…).

• If You Wait by London Grammar (to be honest I don’t love the lyrics but I like the whole sound). 

• Anything by Michael Kiwanuka – his albums are all amazing. We saw him live with the band and amazing singers in Perth in 2017 – I’m living on memories of live gigs just now and that’s a big one.

***I used to hate insomnia but now I just accept it when it comes and try to do something constructive with the time like listen to an album or a radio show that I love. I’d get up and do something but then the elderly dog (an actual dog, I’m not being funny) wakes up too and, you know, a whole saga…

This post is part of my Songs That Stick project for 2022’s Fun A Day Dundee (a community arts project that takes place every January). Anyone can take part (you don’t even have to be local to Dundee) and much of the work can be found on Instagram during January (use #FADD2022). There is usually a real-life exhibition later in the year (though this has been online for the past 2 years). The full list of songs I am writing about this year is here. My first post about why I picked this project this time is here.

If you are interested in my Fun A Day Dundee projects for 2020 and 2021 you can start here and here. They are quite different to this one (a short poem and drawings in 2020 and lots of poems and writing in 2021).