‘I haven’t really done press in a long time,” Tracy Chapman said as she settled onto a bench in the courtyard of San Francisco’s stately Fairmont Hotel recently.

Over the past decade, the singer and songwriter has remained nearly silent, though the past two years have brought renewed fervor for her tenderhearted folk music. In 2023, Luke Combs released a smash cover of her 1988 debut single, “Fast Car,” and the two performed a deeply stirring duet at last year’s Grammys. Still, Chapman has remained resolutely out of the public eye, passing on interviews about the second life of “Fast Car” and declining to attend the Country Music Awards, where it took song of the year, making her the first Black woman, and Black songwriter, to win a CMA.

But Chapman, 61, agreed to this interview because she wants to talk about something she is particularly excited about: the vinyl reissue of her multiplatinum self-titled debut, out now. “This is an opportunity for me to be able to say why I wanted to do this project and what it means to me,” she said, “instead of letting the chatter speak for myself.”

Released in April 1988 when she was 24, her self- titled album introduced Chapman as a poetic, socially conscious lyricist and an uncommonly affecting vocalist in command of a deep, haunting alto. With sparse arrangements driven by Chapman’s acoustic guitar playing, the music on “Tracy Chapman” tackled injustice head on: “Across the Lines” is an autobiographical tale of segregation and racial strife; the bracing a cappella track “Behind the Wall” takes a hard look at domestic violence and the indifference of the police. Chapman’s knack for vividly bringing her all-too- human characters to life kept the album from feeling one- dimensional or didactic. It has also, nearly four decades later, kept these songs feeling fresh.

Chapman’s debut means so much to her in part because its overnight success gave her the power to erect certain boundaries around her personal life. In recent years, she has not been interested in touring (she hasn’t booked one since 2009) or even releasing new music (her most recent album, “Our Bright Future,” was issued the year before). When she made an offhand remark about missing instant feedback from audiences, she quickly batted away a follow-up question about whether she was considering touring: “No, no, not until I put out something new.”

But perhaps that day will eventually come, since she is, as ever, working on new material. “Whether or not I’m in the studio or going on tour, I’m always writing, always playing, always practicing,” she said. “It really is fundamental to who I am, and I think about music all the time.”

This interview with Chapman has been edited for clarity and length.

Q: How long have you been working on this reissue?

A: In 2022, I wrote a note to the president of the label to ask if this was something he would consider. The idea originally was that the record would come out in its 35th year. But as you know, and anyone who can do math realizes, this is 37, and here we are. (Laughs.) We just ran into a number of snags along the way. I listened to every test pressing.

Q: What was it like living with this material again?

A: It’s kind of surreal. It’s a little like “Groundhog Day.” Didn’t I just listen to this entire record yesterday for a couple hours? You’re trying to listen for technical issues. So that’s separate than what or how it makes you feel. But it took me back to my studio time with David Kershenbaum, who was the producer of the first record, and then to some extent thinking about when I wrote some of the songs. I didn’t allow myself to have too many moments of nostalgia.

Q: You were so young when you created some of those songs — 16 when you wrote “Talkin’ Bout a Revolution.”

A: I started writing songs when I was 8 years old, and it was just one of these things that I honestly think was in my DNA. I come from a musical family: My mother sings, my sister sings, so music was in the fabric of my life. But for it to be the thing that altered the course of my life, in such a substantial way — I felt like I was on a path to improving my situation when I was able to go to college. My mother always thought it was very important that me and my sister go to college. And we managed to do that, through scholarships, grants, all that sort of thing. I graduated with my major in anthropology, which was going to make me a lot of money. (Laughs.) To even get to that point was a significant accomplishment for someone coming from a working- class background in Cleveland, Ohio.

Q: What was it like to be back onstage at the Grammys and for your performance to be received so warmly?

A: I mean, in a word, it was great. It was awesome. It was a very emotional moment for so many reasons. Luke is a lovely person. Before deciding to do it, we had a good talk, and we were both on the same page about how we would approach it. That was where it all had to start.

I don’t remember the last time I toured. And when you don’t tour, you also don’t have crew. But the awesome thing was that everyone I called to help with this — they showed up. And so I was weeping, truthfully, when I walked into the rehearsal space. Because Denny Fongheiser, who played drums on the record, Larry Klein who played bass and David Kershenbaum, we were all reunited. I’ve seen all of them through the years at various points, but I think that was the first time we were all together in the same room. Joe Gore also played, and he’s been in my touring band, and Larry Campbell, who played fiddle.

Q: Reissuing this album in this moment, it’s still so relevant. But it also speaks to the power of the songs.

A: I was saying to someone recently, who expressed something similar, that there’s a part of me that wishes certain songs on the record were not relevant right now. My expectation was that we wouldn’t be here. I really believed we were going to be in a better place, with more justice and more equity and less violence. But I think, between the 16-year-old who wrote “Talkin’ Bout a Revolution” and the 61-year-old sitting here with you now, that my values are the same. I still have the same concerns. I still want the same changes that I did at that time. But I certainly have a different perspective. Having grown up in the ’70s and being a beneficiary of the Civil Rights Movement, at a time when things started to look up, I think my expectation was that we’d just keep building on that. I was recently watching a documentary about (Civil Rights activist) Fannie Lou Hamer, and she’s from Mississippi. My grandparents are from Mississippi, and I think I hadn’t really made the connection that in the 1960s, Black people in Mississippi still didn’t have the right to vote. My grandparents left the South in the Great Migration and moved to Cleveland. I think it changed the course of their lives, but it ultimately changed the course of mine, too. The thing that I take from it is that, now that I’m older, is that it’s this constant practice that needs to occur. A constant vigilance. You can’t expect that things will hold.

Q: Has that fueled what you’ve been writing lately?

A: I’m not writing songs like that, but I am writing. I’m still writing story songs. I know that I have been labeled as a protest singer, and it’s not a label that I accept. I’m not mad at it, but it doesn’t fully represent what I do or how I think about myself. I have been lucky in that I get to make a living by pursuing a creative endeavor and letting my mind go where it wants and create these characters like the ones in “Fast Car.” Because I hope everybody knows it’s not me. (Laughs.) I was not, at 24, married with a couple kids — not that there’s anything wrong with that, but this is a work of fiction in that regard. I did, however, feel like I wanted to be someplace where I had connection and a sense of belonging, and that’s the thing in the song that’s me, 100%.