MILEAGE : There’s More to Tracy Chapman Than ‘Fast Car’

The offer of hope to the downtrodden is a standard plank in the protest singer’s platform, and a quiet flame of protest certainly burns through much of Tracy Chapman’s work.

Among the downtrodden who truly took hope from Chapman’s musical breakthrough were her fellow singer-songwriters, the people who toil away crafting pop music that’s literate and lends itself to intimate performance and close listening.

“Tracy Chapman,” her debut album in 1988, probably was the most unlikely pop phenomenon of the last decade. In a time when record sales usually depend on video flash, Chapman’s album of muted, intense, barely adorned folk-pop became a huge commercial success, selling more than 3 million copies in the United States and more than 9 million worldwide.

“Fast Car,” Chapman’s brilliant melding of social commentary with a deeply personal character portrait, was the main attention-grabber, but the album was well-stocked with strong material. One sign of its broad-based influence was that songs from “Tracy Chapman” wound up covered by performers as diverse as Neil Diamond, who recorded “Baby Can I Hold You,” and the L.A. punk-and-roots band Thelonious Monster, which did a driving remake of her outlaw love song “For My Lover.”

Chapman’s climb was sudden and auspicious, from singing in coffeehouses in Boston (where she had earned a degree in anthropology from Tufts University) to singing in stadiums on the 1988 Amnesty International Tour with Peter Gabriel, Bruce Springsteen and Sting. Her arrival signaled to songwriters, and to the record industry, that there still was an audience for simple, straightforward substance. Folk-based music no longer looked like something that only a small, independent label like Rounder or Flying Fish should touch.

Life as a pop phenomenon evidently was no fun for Chapman: Her second album, “Crossroads,” showed a defensive streak in songs complaining that success and the temptations of wealth were threatening her sense of self. But it had enough solid songs--such as “All That You Have Is Your Soul” and “Subcity,” one of several fine songs she has written about the toll of poverty--to prove that Chapman was no mercurial flash but a solid song-crafter who figures to have a long, productive career.

With “Matters of the Heart,” her third album, Chapman appears to have run her course as a pop phenomenon. The album had a relatively brief--three months--run on the charts. That seems less like a failure, though, than a leveling off into normalcy. Notwithstanding her debut success, it’s far-fetched to expect any folk-based performer to sell millions of records.

Artistically, “Matters of the Heart” is further proof of Chapman’s ability to produce thoughtful music within her chosen framework: no loud noises, no comic relief, no departures from a deep-voiced vocal style that is restrained but always expressive. It’s that restraint that allows her to deliver such baldly indicting songs as the anti-greed tirade “So” without sounding as if she is delivering a bullhorn broadside at a protest rally.

Although it lacks the individual gems of her debut album, the new album is a solid, cohesive effort that intertwines protest material with personal reflections on love, while moving from a tone of desolation on both the personal and social fronts toward a sense of renewal and willingness to strive.

Opening for Chapman and her band on their West Coast tour is Ipso Facto, a pop-reggae band from Minneapolis.

Who: Tracy Chapman.

When: Saturday, Sept. 19, at 7:30 p.m.

Where: Pacific Amphitheatre, 100 Fair Drive, Costa Mesa. With Ipso Facto.

Whereabouts: Take the San Diego (I-405) Freeway to the Fairview Roadexit and head south.

Wherewithal: $25.85, $22.55.

Where to call: (714) 979-5944.