It brings down the house, of course. Before she's played "I Feel Lucky" or "He Thinks He"ll Keep Her" or any of the other hits that have helped her sell millions of albums, before she's laughed about cannibalizing my life for song material," before she's mentioned how she and her hips have developed a fondness for rich espresso drinks (Man in crowd:"You look great!" "I love you"),she has sealed her bond with the members of the audience: She's one of them, gently sketching a common ground in sassy love songs and spare, unsettling ballads of emotional dislocation. But talk to Carpenter about that bond she creates onstage, and she's surprisingly uncertain. "Sometimes I feel totally complete and happy and able to communicate and connect with the audience" she says, sitting in a trendy restaurant across the street from Lincoln Center. "But there are other things that get in the way a lot of the time: panicky fear, stage fright that's gotten worse in the last few years." Besides, she adds, "I don't look at it like I go onstage and bare it all. It's not the real me. It's just one of my sides."
This is typical. Give Carpenter a label-country star, folk singer, Everywoman-and she'll say it's not accurate; try to pin her down, and she'll slip away. Intensely private, she says she "tends to contort" on those uncomfortable occasions when she's recognized in public. "She's an ultrasensitive person in a business where your life becomes very public," says singer Shawn Colvin, a close friend. "She obviously doesn't want to be cut off from people, but she wants to protect herself, and her skin is thin. She takes every word that's printed about her to heart. But she rises above it, and she'll always survive.
One way Carpenter survives is by protecting herself. "I read a quote from Helen Hunt that make a lot of sense," she explains. "She said, 'The more I keep my private life private, the more I feel able to put all myself into my work.'" She grins, adding, "Some people seek too much information."
Still, she'll cop to a few things. She lives in a Victorian house near Washington, D.C. She likes to shop; a favorite spot is a Crate and Barrel store connected to a Starbucks coffee bar. She loves Tommy Lee Jones. Now 36, she'd like to settle down and have kids (Hasn't happened yet. I hope it will"). With friends, she's a clown: When she recorded "Down at the Twist and Shout" with members of Beausoleil, band leader Michael Doucet says they spent most of the afternoon eating Chinese food and having a burping contest. (Doucet says Carpenter won; she says he must be mistaken.) She goes by Chapin not Mary. "I think Mary kind of drives her crazy," says her co-producer John Jennings. "There's a certain generic quality to it that I don't think is appropriate. Chapin is a special thing, it's hers, and there aren't a whole lot of them out there.
Carpenter is also an articulate, funny, intelligent woman capable of loosening up and sharing a few personal glimpses. The morning of the Avery Fisher show, she arrives for brunch dressed downed in denim and flannel, apologizes for being uncommunicative at an earlier meeting and talks with quiet passion about what seems to be the central dichotomy of her life and art: Communication, the thing that has made her visible and secure, has never come easily. "I've never quite been able to feel like I'm part of things," she says softly. "it's like being separated by a pane of glass or something. I feel like I've struggled my whole life to try to get past it, and I know it's held me back.
The stuggle, she says, became particularly intense in her teens. Her family moved from New Jersey to Japan; four years later, after they'd returned to the United States, her parents split up. "High school was hard because I was so lonely," she says. "My parents were getting divorced, which was a really painful thing for me, but even harder because I felt so isolated. I'd felt it all my life, but when I became a teenager, I was more conscious that it was this thing that was getting in my way that I didn't know how to fix. And I really think one of the reasons why I started writing songs was that it was an easier way to communicate. It was an escape hatch, a way to feel things and say things without actually having to say them."
Slowly the escape hatch turned into a career. Originally music was a way to bide her time until she figured out how to put her liberal-arts degree from Brown University to work. And even after a club owner in Washington, D.C., said he'd give her $40 a night to play on Tuesdays and Thursday, she figured it was "a way to pay my rent until I figured out what I would do."
John Jennings, another D.C.-area musician, heard her around this time. "I was astonished," says the soft-spoken guitarist. "The fist thing that got to me was how revealing her voice is. It's incredibly intimate, but not in a practiced way. And when we met, we got each other right away. There are very few people where you sit down and go: "I know you. I really know you.'"
At first, Carpenter and Jennings were romantic rather than music partners, but eventually Jennings ended the relationship. A few weeks after the breakup, he spotted Carpenter on a local street and flagged her down. " I was just bereft," she says, picking at her omelet. "And John is a very nice person. He got in my car and asked me how I was, and I just wanted him to suffer like I was suffering. So I very cold to him. He said: "What can I do to make you feel better? How can I be your friend? And I snapped, 'Well you can help me make a tape.'" She laughs. "I told him to help me make a tape because I was mad at him."
That tape, recorded in Jennings' basement studio, later released intact as her first album, 1987's Hometown Girl. Eight years and four albums later, she's still recording with many of the same people-and with Jennings, whom she now calls "my most necessary friend" We've been through so much together, and it astounds me what good friends we are."
Some of what they've been through can be heard in her songs. Her third album, Shooting Straight in the Dark, which contains the breakthrough hit "Down at the Twist and Shout" also includes "The Moon and St. Christopher," a devastating portrait of a woman coming to terms with her heartbreaks and isolation: "I have run from the arms of lovers/I've run from the eyes of friends/I've run from the hands of kindness/I've run just because I can."
"That was a hard song to write," she says hesitantly. "I wrote it after John told me he was going to get married. His marriage wasn't at the emotional heart of it-but when someone very close to you goes through an important passage in life, you're sort of left watching and taking stock of your own life. A lot of times, songwriting has been that for me. It's like using a song to try to find my place in the world, to look at what I've done wrong and what I've done right."
With her first three albums, Carpenter slowly gained acceptance in country music, which had broadened enough to embraced her folk-oriented work. Her fourth album, Come On Come On , was the watershed: With seven hit singles, including "I Feel Lucky" and the defiant "He Thinks He'll Keep Her," she sold two million albums, won two Grammies and cemented her place as, if not Everywoman, then at least an articulate chronicler and champion of Everywoman.
But success took its toll. Carpenter toured incessantly after Come On Come On- a period she calls "baptism by fire"-and says she reached a saturation point. The increase pressure also contributed to the breakup of a long-term relationship, an event about which she'll only say, "It went into the mix" when she started to write her next album. And the writing itself proved difficult. For months, Carpenter didn't like any of her new songs, until an obituary prompted her to break out of her slump by writing "John Doe No.24," the haunting reverie of a blind, deaf and mute man found on the streets. "I projected in a big way onto his story," she says. " I suppose it has to do with just pondering the human condition and our existential loneliness." The song paved the way for the current Stones in the Road, an uncommonly graceful album that deals with estrangement, forgiveness and the tortuous course of love.
Now she's ready to go back on the road, ready to rev up the long and, with luck, not-so-tortuous course of her career. After the Avery Fisher show, Carpenter does her duty to help move the product. Backstage, she gamely works a reception room full of record-company staffers and guest armed with cameras. She meets the bigwigs and smiles for dozens of pictures, all without showing her discomfort.
Then she retreats into a smaller, private room, grabs a nonalcoholic beer and collapses onto a couch. Her tour manager comes in. "Are your OK?" she asks. "I am now," says Carpenter. She says she's satisfied with the show, though she'd been a nervous wreck all day. And when someone mentions "Kung Fu Fighting," the famously awful Carl Douglas song that came on the sound system immediately after she left the stage, she brightens.
"That's was my choice," she says, laughing. "It's great to stand in the wings and watch people when that song comes on because at first they know it, but they can't place it. Then the song kicks in, and you can just watch their faces fall."
She says she wants to make a tape of the worst songs imaginable, and suddenly she and the tour manager are throwing out titles. "Video Killed the Radio Star," suggests Carpenter. "The Pina Colada Song!" "The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia!"
And so it goes. A few feet from the stage where she'd connected with her audience and overcome some of her isolation, Carpenter strains to recall the worst swill she's ever heard. But then, maybe that figures. Think of those awful moments in all of our pasts: a lost love, a family trauma or just a really terrible song. Painful as these moments may be, Mary Chapin Carpenter remembers them all.
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