"People have brains, live contemporary lives, save money for their kids to go to collage and do everything that everybody else does, but because we're all so hypnotized by the image that is put out there, it's hard to get past it."
Carpenter herself had to get used to the idea of being a country artist when she signed with Columbia Records in 1987. By the time she was offered a Nashville record deal, she was already a popular artist in Washington, D.C. Her crowd consisted of mostly folk-ethnic types. She wasn't sure she had the "credentials" for country career.
"I was just a singer/songwriter," Carpenter recalls. "If anything, I felt insecure about fitting into any kind of category. Not because I didn't want to be part of any category, but that I thought that somebody was going to find me out and say"-- she adopts a deep voice--"You don't belong here. You're a fraud.''
"Then somebody called me a country musician, and I was scared. I felt like I was credential- poor, but my heart was in the right place. "Some people might say, like the guy today, 'It's different,' Different is not a bad word. Different is something to celebrate."
Carpenter exudes confidence even during a rare press conference, but, looking back to her W.O. Smith benefit Q&A session earlier in the afternoon, Carpenter says she was "terrified." Some of that was due to the fact that she didn't have a guitar in her hands and isn't comfortable expounding in front of stranger. But some of her fear was programmed into the machine long ago.
"She's very shy," says John Jennings, who met Carpenter in Washington, D.C., in 1982. "She still is a very private person. For an artist, she has some unusual traits. She's practical, thorough. She can be very, very, very focused."
Carpenter's personal journey is an intriguing juxtaposition of the drive to be an independent person and the fear that she'll not be loved or accepted. Listen closely to her music and you'll hear them both, a fascinating mix of confidence and doubt. Listen closely to her conversation and you'll hear similar strains going in opposite directions.
"I'm such a scaredy-cat pessimist," she says. "I'm always asking my manager, "Do you think we'll be renewed?" I just don't think you should take anything for granted."
Carpenter says her insecurity is a passing condition. "There are some days when I feel like shit on the ground, and I can't do anything and I'm a failure -and I'm scared of people- and I don't talk to anybody. There are other days for some reason, I feel strong. It's a real ebb and flow."
Carpenter is the third in the family of four sisters. She grew up in Princeton, N.J., in a house constantly filled with music. Her father, an executive for Life magazine, was a jazz fan, and her mother was an opera fanatic.
The family was uprooted in 1968 when Carpenter's father, Chapin, was transferred to Japan for Life's Asian edition. Mary Chapin, who was 10, remembers the experiences as an adventure. She was only one of four or five American kids at her international school.
"I had previously only grown up in a little town in Jersey," she says. "At a young age we traveled extensively throughout the far east and Europe. In hindsight I realize how fortunate I was.
When Carpenter's family returned to the states after two years, culturally, they felt five years behind. They missed explanations of the first Earth Day. They were stunned to learn that bell bottoms were now tre passe.
Carpenter's teenage years back in Jersey weren't easy. "There was always the cool group in school," she says. "I was in the Poindexter group. So I immediately felt teenage angst, man, oh God. And I felt lonely." Carpenter's parents divorced when she was 16, and Mary Chapin was sent away to school in Connecticut. "There's was just a lot of pain," she recalls. "But I got through it." Carpenter spent most of her senior year at home in Washington, D.C., working as a volunteer for Morris Udall's unsuccessful presidential campaign.
Having toughed it out through two lonely years in boarding school, Carpenter wanted a security blanket. She applied to several colleges and was accepted by Brown, but she deferred her admission. She improvised a plan to save some money and travel. After working on the Capitol Mall's Folklife Festival, she broke the piggy bank, bought a used Volkswagen microbus and headed out to Colorado to "just have fun," Carpenter recalls. The bus blew up two weeks after the purchase. Carpenter ended up moving in with her father, working as a waitress at night and in a bookstore during the day.
Perhaps fate had intervened. At the bookstore, Carpenter met Wendy, her "best friend in the whole world," who convinced her to try performing a open-mic nights at low-profile venues such as the Red Fox Inn. "We'll get up there and sing a few songs, and I was like, (Carpenter squawks frightenedly)'BWAKK! I was gonna die!."
Carpenter eventually enrolled at Brown, where she earned a degree in American Civilization, and each summer was spent back in D.C.'s music scene. "I loved being in college. My parents believed in education for education's sake. They didn't expect us to be pre-professional, like people I knew, who were going to be president of IBM by the time they were 30. I couldn't relate to that", she says.
Just as Carpenter disdains pejorative assumptions about country music, she loathes romanticized assumptions about her alma mater. "Whatever I read 'Ivy League,' it bothers me, because it sounds outdated, and it has a very elitists air to it," she sighs. "That not why I went to Brown. It always bothers me, quite frankly, when the inevitable headline -the hook- is, 'What's an Ivy League something-something doing in country music?' "To me, it's lazy on the part of the interviewer that they couldn't see past that. It doesn't matter where you went to college. It's all what you make of yourself. A lot of people went to college and didn't get shit out of it."
After graduation, Carpenter and her friend Wendy traveled through Europe and returned to the D.C. area. Carpenter began performing more regularly. Still in her 20's and agonizing "over everything," she sought comfort in her "bunch of friends who did the same thing." They talked shop and hung out at a club called The Birchmere. "We not only played music together, we'd go on canoe trips together too," she remembers. "It was a lovely era."
After three years of hustling for gigs and trying to make rent each month, Carpenter was worn out. She took a job with a small foundation deeply involved in human-rights issues in Central America and South Africa. With the support of a steady paycheck, Carpenter concentrated on more on her writing. "There sort of a clarity and a relaxed feeling about wanting to do music for music sake. It made me love it," she says.
Carpenter who won an armful of Washington Area Music Awards in 1986, began making a tape in Jennings' basement studio. The idea was to have a tape to sell, on-site, at gigs. The recording went so well, however, that it attracted the attention of Rounder Records, a highly respected independent label. One week before Carpenter was to have finalized her Rounder deal, Columbia's Nashville's Larry Hamby called to say he's like to hear the tape. The next day Hamby called back and said Columbia wanted to sign Carpenter. She was, of course, surprised.
"That was the start of my awareness of how much Nashville-- or rather, country music--was changing," explained Carpenter. "I think you have to accept that premise-- that it was changing --in order to accept the premise of me in it."
It was several years before Carpenter's career took flight. She kept her D.C. day job for two years after becoming a major-label artist. She'd work during the week and hit the road for gigs on weekends.
Carpenter's first album, Hometown Girl, sold modestly but received raves from the critics. Her second album, State of the Heart, seemed more tailored to country aesthetics: The first tune, "How Do," mentioned common country subjects such as boots and cowboys. But songs such as the introspective "This Shirt," the soaring "Quitting Time," and the defiant "You Never Had It So Good," proved that Carpenter's talent as a writer and performer had a more universal appeal.