When Tracy Chapman took to the stage at the 2024 Grammys, to duet with Luke Combs on his huge, award-winning country rendition of her trademark 1988 song “Fast Car”, the world was beyond delighted to see her. Catching a glimpse of Chapman, 37 years on from her self-titled first album, an album widely considered by music critics and fans alike to be a “perfect debut”, is always a treat.
Since Chapman, now 61, burst onto the music scene in her early twenties, she’s sold around 44 million albums worldwide and won multiple awards, including four Grammys. But that commercial success doesn’t tell the full story: her influence, power and legacy, as a Black woman singer-songwriter, incredible storyteller and feminist voice, are huge.
These days, Chapman doesn’t venture out of her San Francisco bubble very often — but when she does, she makes it count. As a singer-songwriter whose songs often make political statements, people sometimes expect her to be kind of grumpy and serious. Private, yes. Grumpy, no. Throughout her performance with Combs, Chapman had a twinkle in her eye and a smile on her face, clearly as overjoyed to be there as the star-studded audience were to watch her (At one point, Taylor Swift was filmed singing along.) And Combs, who covered the song after growing up as a huge fan of the artist, clearly couldn’t believe he’d pulled this off.
As comedian W. Kamau Bell put it in a Substack essay about Chapman: “This was her moment and more importantly her song. He actually looked a little nervous. He even looked like he was cherishing the moment. Like he knew Tracy Chapman doesn’t leave her house for bulls–t, so he’d better make this worth her while.”
This is the power Chapman holds over millions of fans around the world. She isn’t retired, but she picks and chooses when she wants to work. Last month, in April 2025, she re-issued that classic debut on vinyl, much to the excitement of her passionate, loyal fanbase — especially as she left the comforts of her San Francisco home to give a number of interviews to promote it.
“I’m still on a break,” she told the German press. “I have no plans to go on tour, and I have no plans to go into the studio. Who knows what might happen, but right now, there are no plans.”
Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs John Shearer/Getty Images for The Recording Academy
Her words to Billboard the same month gave a little more hope to anyone hoping to catch the star live — or at least hear some new music from her (her last album, One Bright Future, was released in 2008.) “If I were to tour, I would tour for something new, new material, and in that process, I would, of course, play these songs, too,” she said. “But that would be the thing that would be most interesting to me at this point. And that’s always the case. Whenever someone asks, ‘What’s your favorite song?’ It’s always the one I’m writing at the time. I said it before, but maybe no one believed it, that I’m always playing and I’m always writing songs. I’ve been doing it since I was 8 years old. It’s just part of my DNA. It’s part of who I am.”
Chapman’s hiatus is her longest yet — but she puts it down to working so hard when she first started out; she was just 24 when her debut dropped. “I had success with the first record, and I had to keep making records,” she told Time in 2000, in an interview unearthed by her devoted fansite, Tracy Chapman Online. “I felt like my life was on this cycle that was beyond my control. Making records and touring, making records and touring, and in that process not being at home and not being settled. They weren’t particularly happy times.”
Chapman was so young when she was catapulted to fame that it was all pretty overwhelming, but she also has some incredible memories of that special time, including a live TV performance to millions of viewers around the world at a Nelson Mandela birthday concert in London in 1988. “I was a complete beginner and had only ever sung in front of small audiences in cafés,” she told Spiegel in 2017. “Suddenly I was standing in front of this huge backdrop for an earth-shattering event. I tried not to let the stage fright show: Breathe in, breathe out. Backstage I met Chrissie Hynde, who was also performing. Like me, she’s from Ohio, which made me feel connected and took away some of my fear.”
After the show, her album shifted 20 million copies worldwide, outselling well-established artists like Michael Jackson and Pink Floyd. “My record company had expected sales of around 200,000 and nobody expected such a huge success, least of all me,” she recalled.
Tracy Chapman in 1988 Dave Hogan/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Chapman loved that her music got so much recognition, but she didn’t love the attention. By the 1990s, she felt a little disillusioned with it all. She still released music every few years, but her live performances were few and far between. “I admit that I don’t enjoy touring as much anymore,” she told Spiegel. “I probably did it too extensively before.”
As a solo artist with an intensity to her lyrics and performances, Chapman realized quickly that she needed to carve out time away from work to refuel. “It’s hard to create a good balance between work life and, you know, home life,” she said in a Belgian TV interview in 2003. “But you know I do what I can. And of course when you’re touring, it’s very heavily balanced on work… I don’t like to travel. I’m not going to sit here and complain about it. It’s really hard. But it’s great to have the chance to play music for people all over the world so it balances out.”
While Chapman grew up in Ohio, when she found fame she made San Francisco her home — and it was a decision she made with her wellbeing in mind. “I chose San Francisco because I didn’t feel like being in New York or Los Angeles,” she told the Italian press in 2015, per Tracy Chapman Online. “It’s a city that looks like me, quiet without being provincial. I put quality of life before work. One thing is true though, after so many years I wanted to get it over with touring. Life on the road, which many people find exhilarating, was beyond wearisome for me. I wanted to stop in one place and stay there, take a break, which then became long, and even longer. Not that the years of frenetic activity were a nightmare but living in a normal place as a normal person is essential to my balance.”
Actually, Chapman’s everyday existence sounds pretty blissful, and far from dull. Although her personal life has always remained very private — author Alice Walker said the two women were in a happy relationship in the 1990s, but Chapman has never spoken about it — over the years she has revealed a few details about her life away from music. “I lead a quiet life, enjoy cooking and have a small garden where I grow strawberries, tomatoes and green beans,” she told The Sunday Times in 2015. “I read all the time, I read all kinds of things. I read a lot of non-fiction actually. I had some goals in mind, being in one place and one of my goals was to become a regular at a restaurant to the point where they knew what I wanted to order before I even said anything. And I feel that I’ve been successful in that.”
Tracy Chapman in 2002 Carlos Alvarez/Getty Images
Perhaps contrary to her serious, political image, she’s not a loner by any means — she’s out all the time and, on the rare occasions she’s photographed, she always has a huge grin on her face. “I’m often at the beach or hiking,” she told Spiegel. “I’m out in nature and also enjoy being around people. I don’t want to have to barricade myself at home, I want to take part in life, because that’s the only way I can find new themes and inspiration for my songs. And one thing is also clear: I’m definitely still too young to retire.”
Chapman is also an animal lover, telling The Financial Times in 2016 that her childhood ambition was to be a veterinarian “and have the world’s largest animal hospital.” She hasn’t yet achieved that, but she does say that walking her dogs on the beach is her happy place. “I love dogs,” she said. “They are loyal, brave and trusting.”
Her words to the Telegraph in 2015 also summed up her midlife priorities. “You need to keep something for yourself,” she said. “As a writer, I feel that even more strongly. I feel like I need to be able to freely observe the world. That’s the way I like to move through the world; I don’t need to be the focus of attention. If I am, it impairs my ability to write and to do what I do.”
One thing that doesn’t steal Chapman’s attention? Technology. Despite pressure from her record company, she doesn’t use social media and, in 2015, she still didn’t have a smartphone. “I can’t entirely escape it [social media],” she told Associated Press. “In some ways you end up being a part of it because you’re in somebody’s selfie or something like that. I just feel like there’s already so much to do, just in going through life and keeping things in order and functioning, that I don’t really need to add one more thing…. It seems like it requires a lot of energy.”
Staying off social media is, of course, another thing that adds to the irresistible mystique she’s inadvertently cultivated, something author Zadie Smith said was a reason she found Chapman so alluring. Writing for The Guardian in March 2025, Smith summed up the star’s unique appeal. “For years, the only photograph I’d ever seen of her was the one on the front of that first album,” she wrote. “Yet despite knowing next to nothing about her, I and millions of others have been listening to her for decades. When you write songs like Tracy Chapman does, you don’t really need to do anything else but that. Her debut is the articulation of this principle: 11 perfect songs, with no fat and no filler, driven by a clear unity of purpose that announces itself from the get-go and never lets up.”
Tracy Chapman in 2014 Fred Hayes Getty Images Entertainment
Unsurprisingly, you won’t find Chapman browsing Spotify. “I do listen to music still,” she told the New York Times in April 2025. “I don’t listen to as much as I used to, and I’m maybe going to date myself now, or someone’s going call me a Luddite, but I don’t stream music. I only buy music in physical form. Artists get paid when you actually buy a CD or the vinyl. That’s important to me. So to some extent, it limits what I listen to, because it’s a physical commitment of going out into the world and finding things, but I still do go out.”
Music, nature, food, books, pets … Chapman seems to be living the life that all creative introverts dream of. “Being in the public eye and under the glare of the spotlight was, and it still is, to some extent, uncomfortable for me,” she told The Irish Times in 2015. “There are some ways by which everything that has happened in my life has prepared me for this career. But I am a bit shy.”
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When it feels right, though, she still has it in her to be an incredible performer who looks like she’s born to be on stage. On her Grammy’s duet with Combs, she sounded as note-perfect and soulful as she did back in her twenties — and becoming the first Black woman and Black songwriter to ever win a Country Music Award thanks to Combs’ cover made it well worth leaving the house for. “I never expected to find myself on the country charts, but I’m honoured to be there,” she told Rolling Stone in 2023.
When she’ll next pop up on stage or screen to delight her fans and win over a whole new generation of music lovers remains a mystery for now — but she does still have one big ambition left to fulfil that would blow that serious, worthy image out of the water. “Years ago, a manager asked me if there was something I had yet to do,” she told the Financial Times.”I said I wanted to be on Sesame Street and I’d like to be a character on The Simpsons who was friends with Lisa. I made it on to Sesame Street but The Simpsons never came through.”
