People’s real hopes and dreams can be distorted and misdirected and packaged until you’re not sure what you really want or what you even really need. – Tracy Chapman
If you are living a life that feels right to you, if you’re willing to take creative chances or a creative path that feels like it’s mostly in keeping with your sensibilities, you know, aesthetic and artistic, then that’s what matters. – Tracy Chapman
I dressed up as a veterinarian for a Halloween costume party. I had the lab coat. I got a couple of stuffed animals for patients and put bandages on them. – Tracy Chapman
With other people, you’re always swapping music. Somebody is always listening to something you’ve never heard. It’s a great way to hear all sorts of new things. – Tracy Chapman
I picked up the guitar at 11, but even before then, I was writing songs on the organ. – Tracy Chapman
So much has happened to obscure the dialogue about race and about gender and discrimination in general, especially where those things touch on economics. – Tracy Chapman
You have to pay attention to the moment and make it the best it can be for you. I’ve been trying to do that. It’s really made a major difference for me. I’m a happier person. – Tracy Chapman
We have more media than ever and more technology in our lives. It’s supposed to help us communicate, but it has the opposite effect of isolating us. – Tracy Chapman
Growing up in Cleveland, I learned about singing from my mother, who had once sung professionally and who admired Mahalia Jackson and Aretha Franklin. – Tracy Chapman
When you feel like you’ve had a good show, you go backstage and you talk to yourself about it, and if you have a bad show you talk to yourself about it. – Tracy Chapman
Music was never just a hobby for me. I’d pick up a guitar every day to work on whatever I was writing at the time. I would put my ideas in songs the way some people might put them in diaries or journals. – Tracy Chapman
After it’s finished, sometimes I can trace a path that goes back to the possible source of inspiration. – Tracy Chapman
What does the future look like if the heads of society ask our young people to risk their lives for questionable causes? I think it looks rather bleak. – Tracy Chapman
My older sister encouraged me from early on and bought me one of the first guitars I had. She listened to all of the crappy songs that I wrote when I was 8 years old and encouraged me to keep doing it. – Tracy Chapman
I grew up with music in the house. I was told I could sing as soon as I started talking. Everybody in my family sang, always lots of records, blues and jazz and soul, R&B, you know, like Mahalia Jackson, Aretha Franklin, Coltrane, that kind of thing. – Tracy Chapman