Tracy Chapman

Her chart puts four planets in fire signs, three in earth, three in water and not one in air. Air is the element of the argument set out and explained, and the chart of a songwriter has none of it, which is the first thing worth noting. The record says Chapman's Fast Car has charted in four decades.

The Sun, Mercury, Mars and Jupiter sit across twenty six degrees of Aries, four planets in the sign that begins things and will not wait, and the Moon answers from Scorpio. Aries starts and Scorpio gives nothing away. For a writer whose best known song has kept returning decade after decade, those two signs between them describe the making and the withholding.

A yod holds the Sun, Moon and Pluto and does not resolve, with the Sun at an awkward angle to the Moon at a third of a degree, so identity and private feeling keep pointing at concentrated force without settling between them. Mercury sits conjunct Jupiter at seven tenths, speech alongside the planet of scale. Jupiter stands at a strained angle to Pluto at a quarter. The three outer planets were all retrograde. In a songwriter, identity and feeling pointing at force without resolving is where a song that keeps returning comes from.

Saturn arrived back on its Pisces birth degree on 18 November 2023, at fifty nine, six months after Jupiter had closed its own lap. That is a second Saturn return, and Pisces holds no edge, so what it asks is what a working life let through rather than what it built. For a record whose single line is a song that keeps coming back, what was let through is almost exactly the right question. Jupiter had closed its own lap six months before that, which puts both returns inside the same year. Four planets in Aries with nothing at all in air is the structure of somebody who wrote the thing and then declined to explain it, which is a fair account of a catalogue the record reduces to one title.