Tracy Chapman: For My Lover
[purchase]
There are many songs which make extravagant, even obsessive, declarations of love. Tracy Chapman’s For My Lover is the only one I know of where the singer is willing to go to jail for him. In a 1988 interview in Rolling Stone, Chapman made a connection between this song and Mountains of Things. She explained it this way:
One thing that really concerns me is a sense of balance. You know, when you’re talking about material things, it’s where those things fit into your life. Then, with relationships, too, how do you position yourself in relation to other people ? It’s a fine line sometimes, trying to hold on to yourself and your own identity and either being lured into having other people define them for you or having the things around you define them for you.