Rainy day woman: looking inward, Tracy Chapman is depressed but not down.

Two years of Mr. Bush's America evidently haven't yet reactivated Tracy Chapman's social conscience. On the five albums since her self-titled 1988 debut, she has gradually inverted the political-to-personal song ratio. Her latest, Let It Rain, has a lone commentary about Information Age issues; everything else, barring one instrumental, is closer to home.

Even so, there's a sense of hard times. The title track wanders in search of a hopeful sign; "Another Sun" is flat-out suicidal. But there is balance: The first single, "You're the One," is the assured answer to "Let It Rain," and "Say Hallelujah" sends off the dead with the hand clapping and tambourine shaking of an old spiritual.

Fittingly, the album has a decidedly rainy-day sound, with Chapman's acoustic guitar colored by indigo-shaded Dobro, bouzouki, and vibraphone. Her lyrical weakness--the plainspokenness that resonates in a protest song but can sink a ballad--is largely offset by her increasingly confident vocals. Who cares about the doubts expressed in the words of "Happy" when all one remembers is the postcoital whisper singing them?