

I don't want no one to squeeze me, they might take away my life You can call me baby, you can call me anytime
Tracy chapman give me one reason how to#
The easy, fast & fun way to learn how to sing: Give me one reason to stay hereīaby I got your number and I know that you got mineīut you know that I called you, I called too many times A well known version of this song featuring Eric Clapton was released in 1999 in the compilation album A Very Special Christmas Live. Chapman earned the Grammy Award for Best Rock Song for the track, that was also nominated for Record of the Year, Song of the Year and Best Female Rock Vocal Performance at the Grammy Awards of 1997. A music video was released to promote the single. Chapman first performed "Give Me One Reason" six years before its release, on the December 16, 1989, episode of Saturday Night Live. Elsewhere, the song reached number 16 in New Zealand, but it underperformed in the United Kingdom, peaking at number 95 in March 1997. It is also her biggest hit in Australia, where it reached number three as well, and it topped the charts of Canada and Iceland. It was released on her 1995 album New Beginning, and as a single the same year, her first since 1992's "Dreaming on a World." The song is Chapman's biggest US hit to date, reaching number three on the Billboard Hot 100.

Weeks after “Give Me One Reason” fell out of the Hot 100, another crop of perennials stood ready to take its place, including a breakthrough by an Anaheim ska act."Give Me One Reason" is a song written and recorded by American singer-songwriter Tracy Chapman. On “Give Me One Reason” she had gotten where she wanted to go, and she found comfort in pop blues verities. “I had a plan to get us outta here,” Chapman said in “Fast Car,” using the voice of a woman fleeing a stoning. Even “You Light Up My Life” had a nuclear glow. Yet “Give Me One Reason” makes this list because pop radio treated it like an event. Except for Chapman’s gender ambivalent vocal, it boasts no danger, no tension except insisting on its blandness. In the annals of top forty fare it’s rare to stumble on a blockbuster this ephemeral. Readers must have wondered by now, what of “Give Me One Reason”? There is nothing to say. As a result, the poignantly titled New Beginnings went five times platinum, surpassing the sales of her 1988 breakthrough. If Chapman has a beach house in the Seychelles, credit “Give Me One Reason,” not “Fast Car.” It went into recurrent play for most of 1997. It dominated the late spring, summer, and the rest of 1996. This fact does the song’s feat no justice. After a strong debut, it hurtled into the top ten in its sixth week on May 11 for sixteen more weeks. Yet in the year of Fugees, Toni Braxton, and Oasis, it surpassed every expectation. It turned on the title hook and a couple isolated moments of guitar anarchy, the kind listeners would expect on a John Hiatt album. She reached backward to a twelve-bar blues number she debuted on Saturday Night Live when Crossroads was flailing. 1992’s Matters of the Heart, its prospects augured by its generic title (when aren’t things matters of the heart?), bombed.įor her fourth album Chapman needed a jolt of electrical shockers. Crossroads, the 1989 followup to her beloved eponymous debut, tread water.

Simply put, nothing she released after “Fast Car” - a change of pace and poised gesture of empathy in the Steve Winwood and Def Leppard-dominated summer of 1988 - stuck. In 1995, Tracy Chapman found herself in the limbo inhabited by former multiplatinum artists, uncertain whether the next album that barely ships low six figures will cause her label to drop her. Fugees’ “Killing Me Softly,” Jann Arden’s “Insensitive,” Mariah Carey’s “Always Be My Baby,” Goo Goo Dolls’ “Name,” Natalie Merchant’s “Carnival,” among others, blanketed airwaves that spring only Carey’s perennial topped the chart, but top 40 radio acted as if the others had or would.Īmong the beneficiaries of this approach was a thirty-one-year-old Grammy winner for Best New Artist who seven years later saw her career given a momentum that her most famous hit could not have anticipated. Thanks to the industry’s waning interest in the single, airplay made sure that a dozen songs were blasting in the car all the time.
Tracy chapman give me one reason full#
Songs beloved by colleagues and songs to which I’m supposed to genuflect will get my full hurricane-force winds, but it doesn’t mean that I won’t take shots at a jukebox hero overplayed when I was at a college bar drinking a cranberry vodka in a plastic thimble-sized cup.ġ996 was the year when pop radio practiced death by saturation. I promise my readers that my list will when possible eschew obvious selections.

I don’t want to hate songs to do so would shake ever-sensitive follicles, and styling gel is expensive. Like a good single, a terrible one reveals itself with airplay and forbearance.
