Tracy Chapman in Irvine: Still Talking About ‘Revolution’

COSTA MESA —  Current events have caught up with Tracy Chapman.

Accordingly, she opened her concert at the Pacific Amphitheatre’s scaled-down “Pavilion” configuration Saturday with a song that likened the night “the riots begin” to the death of “the dream of America” but closed the set with another song calling for “poor people (to) rise up and get their share.”

The remarkable thing is that both songs, “Across the Lines” and “Talkin’ ‘Bout a Revolution,” appeared on her 1988 debut album and were actually written in 1985 and 1982, respectively. Saturday, they framed Chapman’s show with a clear message: The riots may not have been the answer, but things have got to change.

But between those songs Chapman devoted so much time to singing about downtrodden people’s dreams of a better world that it wouldn’t have been surprising for her to cap the show with the Depression-era hobo fantasy “Big Rock Candy Mountain.”

That’s all well and good, but Chapman failed to offer any suggestions for how to achieve that utopia, save for a between-song plea for people to register and vote. And she tends to paint in broad strokes, especially when identifying the sources of oppression.

Still, the instinct that makes her distill issues to good guy/bad guy simplicity also makes for her greatest strength: her economy of words and music. With her new material she seems to have hit her stride as a lyricist, poetically opening peepholes into complicated emotional landscapes.

And a few times on Saturday, Chapman opened a peephole into her own emotions. Best was an apparently spontaneous encore of Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away.” Chapman seemed almost transformed as she buoyantly played the choppy chords and sang the joyous words--a personal revolution that a fan can actually see and feel.