Q Magazine January 1997 Story by Bill Prince
"That would have been right here in Switzerland actually..." Amused by this unexpected serendipity, she unknits her brow. "I'd just gotten out of college and my friend Wendy and I were doing that Eurail thing for a couple of months. We'd met up with these two guys, got some wine, and I remember walking outside and - I swear to God - on the other side of the lake was a man with an alpenhorn. It was like something out of a chocolate commercial. And I remember thinking how extraordinarily rare that was. A period in your life when you have no responsibilities, complete freedom of movement..."
Seventeen years later, such solitary epiphanies would seem permanently off-schedule. Carpenter and her five-strong band are in Gstaad, adventure playground of the rich and titled, to headline both days of the eight annual, ahem, Country Night festival. The love child of a local property developer and corporate sponsors Nissan, it's housed in a centrally heated, semi-permanent marquee on the edge of this disproportionately famous hamlet and features, alongside Carpenter, David Ball, Perfect Stranger and her recent touring partner, Lyle Lovett. An impressive display of nationally minted neutrality (well-meant if muted appreciation of each and every soloist's efforts) apart, it could be anywhere that features silly-pretty mountain scenery and steak au poivre at 45 pound a pop.
A situation that Country Music Television - who've gone to the trouble of airlifting presenters in from Nashville - is doing its best to rectify. Having already dispatched one of the artists to pose with, yes an alpenhorn, and in the absence of Lovett (who is later spotted, leather-clad and crash helmet in hand, returning from a bike-borne spin through the region),it has fallen on Carpenter to talk up the merits of, among other hastily purchased props, a bar of Toblerone and a child's comforter that moos like, well, a cow before the rapt CMT host.
There's very little talk of the five-time Grammy winner's soon-to-be-released sixth album, A Place In The World, beyond a brief amplification of the themes laid bare in its title, before Carpenter and her band are whisked to the roof of the five-star Castle hotel (motto:"Cold feet...warm heart") to indulge in some televisual horseplay involving triangles of Switzerland's most well-travelled confection being hurled into adjacent properties' swimming pools. This is followed by a master class in how not to get on in Nashville by keyboard player Jon Carroll - who, amid blasts of terrified laughter from his colleagues, adopts the persona of snaggle-toothed hillbilly retard "Luke"- followed by his boss's impromptu rendition of Oklahoma! in twinset-and pearls tenor reminiscent of the late comedienne Joyce Grenfell.
Behavior not normally observed among the denizens of Nashville's spangled maw,then, but, as profiles of this three-time Country Music Association Award winner delight in pointing out, Carpenter has become a prized commodity without once succumbing to C&W City rapacious appetite for the tried-and-tested. Happy to put flesh on the bones of Nashville's usual traffic in human frailty and the redemptive powers of positive thinking, hers is an alluring mix of the sassy and the sad, neatly dovetailing qualities that have resulted in four Billboard country Number 1s (the most recent being 1994's Shut Up And Kiss Me) and tellingly, the kind of critical favor reserved for the genre's master songsmiths.
The third of four sister, Nashville's new First Lady of Country was born in the Ivy League town of Princeton, New Jersey, where her sheltered childhood took a further turn for the unorthodox when her father, Chapin (Mary is her mother's name - she uses both but answers only to the former), was appointed Publishing Director of Life magazine's Asian edition.
"I remember when my folks told us we were moving to Tokyo," she recalls, sipping milk-free tea in her fifth floor suite. "I was like, No! So, needless to say, two years later, when they told us we were going back to the States, I wept. I didn't want to leave. I'd gone to an international school, my sisters and I had picked up the language and we all felt very independent. But then we came back to America and, well, we were still wearing bell-bottoms for a start...We'd definitely missed some steps there. I felt like a Geek"
Her family having relocated to Washington DC, and heeding the advice of a prescient teacher back in Tokyo to keep up her interest in guitar, Carpenter did what any bookish, shy wittily observant child witnessing the break up of her parents' marriage (they divorced when Chapin was 16) might do: she retired to her bedroom to write songs.
In 1981, Carpenter graduated from Brown University with a degree in American Studies and having rode the student Eurotrail, embarked on a career in welfare administration, spending her evenings performing at pass-the-hat spots in DC- "Not just Top 40 acoustic music: Dan Fogelberg, The Eagles," she points out, "but Guy Clark, Townes Van Zandt, bits of Billie Holiday. I like to think I had an eclectic set list."
That same year she met local musician John Jennings, started a relationship that eventually turned sour and, on subsequently waving him down on a suburban Washington street, exacted her revenge on a love-affair-gone wrong by insisting he help produce a tape she could sell at gigs.
"I didn't want to lose Chapin as a friend," the balding, slightly manic guitarist says of the fateful encounter. "Besides, I really thought she had everything you needed to make it: she's a wonderful singer, a fine guitarist, a great songwriter and she has real charisma. There's a lot of power there."
Hiring local musicians, the pair recorded nine originals and a cover of Tom Waits's Downtown Train, initially destined for a small-scale release on respected folk and bluegrass imprint, Rounder Records, until a friend (later Carpenter's co-manager) played it to an A&R scout in what was the CBS's Nashville division, who promptly released them as her debut album, 1987"s Hometown Girl.
Lighting few commercial fires, Hometown Girl nevertheless established a pattern: Carpenter recording in a Springfield, Virginia studio with Jennings at the helm and a close-knit band of musicians drawn from the Washington area. 1989's State Of The Heart was certified gold and spawned four country hits, but it was the platinum-selling Shooting Straight From The Heart, released the following year, which gave Carpenter her first Grammy - -for the cod-cajun stomp Down At The Twist And Shout ( a collaboration with Louisiana's Beausolei that artfully belied its real-life suburban setting of Bethesda, Maryland). Songs liked Middle Ground also established the singer's preeminence at essaying the fears and foibles of what was for some to become her key audience: thirtysomething career women for whom the price of independence is an aching, on occasion bitterly ruminative, loneliness.
Although she herself provides a handy illustration of such a person (living alone in Washington's swanky Chevy Chase district with, she cheerfully admits, the canine manifestation of her longing for children, Cal and Riley, she confesses her anxiety to start a family is tempered by an acceptance that it may now never happen), Carpenter is unwilling to see herself as merely hymning the despairs of the upwardly mobile.
"Middle Ground was inspired by a talk I had with one of my sisters. She was living a pretty typical existence for our generation-single, working, a boyfriend here and there, her friends starting to settle down and start families. Which can lead to a feeling of WhatamIdoing?! But I've had guys say to me, I relate to that song very strongly - that's my life too."
Meanwhile, her performance of the acerbic, bottom-of-the-bill lament Opening Act at the 1990 Country Music Association Awards had proved pivotal, confuting all whose perception of Nashville as a closed shop of self-satisfied throwbacks had remained unaltered despite its opening the door to the likes of Lovett, Nanci Griffith and Steve Earle in the mid-'80s. "You can't have a mainstream without a fringe," observes Carpenter. "And suddenly the fringe was the place to be."
However, while touring Australia with Roseanne Cash and Lucinda Williams (who penned her Grammy-winning hit Passionate Kisses) the following year, Carpenter has a less successful brush with the TV cameras, "corpsing" live on air during an early morning promotional slot.
"It felt like a rug had been pulled away from underneath me," she shudders. "Like I'd woken up that morning and this thing that I'd been doing all my life had suddenly been taken away from me."
Two more attacks convinced Carpenter to seek professional advice. "I was asked what I thought about when it was really bad, and I'd think about what I was wearing, and -this is the really weird part- I'd be wearing black. And if I'd done a really great gig, I'd be wearing green. So, ever since then I'll always have something green on me- I've got a green ring, I'll take a piece of greenery and put it in my bra, and I'll focus on the green exit signs at the back of the hall."
With problems of his own, Jennings had absented himself from Carpenter's touring band for almost a year ("I was getting grumpy, so I left before I was fired") when the singer called suggesting they make another record. "I didn't think I'd be making Come On Come On," he acknowledges, clearly thankful that he did, sharing in its multi-platinum success, seven country hits and the career-defining He Thinks He'll Keep Her. A cold-eyed dissection of a dead-end marriage, it's the song with which, for better or for worse, Carpenter is most closely identified.
"I don't know if it's the correct use of the term ironic," cautions Carpenter, "but I wrote that song with a guy. And I have to remind people of that when they say, That's a man-bashing song..."
Surely it's a relationship-bashing song.
"Exactly, it's the realization that this woman is somewhere that she shouldn't be and it's up to her to empower herself to do something about it. I've met people who have not lived 'the examined life": in other words, they haven't looked inside themselves. They're oblivious to their feelings. Their lives may be utterly fucked up, but they never stop to figure out why. They're leading 'the unexamined life.' I think the actual quote goes something like, "The unexamined life isn't worth living'."
Unsurprisingly, Carpenter is a game if necessarily guarded proselytizer for the therapeutic powers of the black leather couch.
"I consider it an ongoing thing. There have been periods when I've been flying solo and there have been other times when I've needed to talk to someone. So I see it as part of my life. I don't expect that in five years I'll be so much wiser or so much more adept that I won't need to talk to somebody."
Its effects are perhaps most keenly felt on 1994's Stone In The Road, a US country Number 1 album for five straight weeks and arguably Carpenter's finest work: a combination of skillfully rendered artifice (Jubilee's country waltz, for example), songwriting acumen (John Doe No. 24's lyrical extrapolation of a 400-word news agency obituary of an unknown, institutionalized deaf and blind man), and some perilously self-revelatory writing on the intractability of profound depression.
"What we as an audience ask the songwriter to do is examine areas of life that we don't really want to bother with" offers Jennings on Carpenter's willingness to tackle some pretty ugly emotions. "We ask them to be experts in a field that we just don't want to have to cover."
The songwriter, however, is more practically minded: The times in your life when you're feeling really inward is almost like fuel for the process of writing. That sense of isolation gives you a feeling of strength. There's a cathartic element to it, definitely."
With the release of A Place In The World still some weeks away, the merchandising stand is doing sluggish business in Mary Chapin Carpenter fridge magnets the night her co-headlining tour with Lyle Lovett pulls into Wembley. It's certainly no comfy club date (a curtain has been drawn, reducing the capacity of the Arena's capacious hangar, but it's still on the chill side), and pitching Lovett's 16-strong Big Band against Carpenter's five-man combo could be regarded as a mismatch. Still, the reaction to new, radio-friendly songs I Wanna Be Your Girlfriend and Let Me Into Your Heart (picked up for the soundtrack of Kevin Costner golf vehicle Tin Cup) is encouragingly warm.
Afterwards in her cramped dressing room, Carpenter returns the green ring she's been wearing to its jewelry box and, as well-wishers gather in the corridor, admits with hitherto well-concealed command of the touring vernacular to feeling like "shit on a shingle". A show in Dublin and then it's home to her two "children" followed by a solid month of "promotion up the ass".
With country music in one of its periodic fallow periods and even USA Today grumbling that last month's CMA awards-where Carpenter dressed in apparatchik grab and sporting the red ribbon of AIDS awareness, presented George Strait with a gong-lacked excitement, mightn't now be a good time to call in that all-important crossover hit?
I have a heads-down approach," counters Carpenter, balling her fists beneath a shapeless grey sweatshirt. "I like to go from project to project. That's what I consider fulfilling."
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