SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH  MARY CHAPIN  CARPENTER

A Rambling Conversation With the Queen of New County Music

David Herndon. STAFF WRITER

 Newsday, 05-07-1995, pp 12.
THE DAY AFTER playing onstage in front of a hometown audience of 125,000 people at the Earth Day rally in Washington two weeks ago, her image enlarged to drive-in-movie size on the concert's giant video screen, the reigning queen of new country is walking her golden retriever in Rock Creek Park. Among the parade of strollers, joggers and rollerbladers passing by, Cal is getting a lot more attention than his famous owner. "As it should be," says Mary Chapin Carpenter. "He is so beautiful and wonderful." It's true the dog is quite a looker, and Carpenter dotes on him, even taking him along on the tour bus as she makes her way around the country. ("Who needs a boyfriend when you can have a pet?" she sometimes sings from concert stages.) But more remarkable than Cal's animal magnetism is the relative anonymity of his companion's public profile. Today, for instance, she's wearing the kind of gal-next-door Sunday stuff - flannel overshirt, jeans, T-shirt, Nikes and rose-colored sunglasses - that doesn't fetch a second glance. This plain style comes naturally, but it's also protective coloration; when the Washington Post ran a picture of her new house in Chevy Chase, Carpenter fretted about her safety. And, paradoxically, Carpenter's kind of shy, especially for someone who sells millions of records and habitually wins the grandest awards the music industry has to offer. Interviews intimidate her; she dreads having her picture taken and making videos. "I'm just as insecure about my looks as anybody else," she says. A convincing and driven performer, she nevertheless wrestles with demon stage fright. So when she has a rare weekend day off at home, Cal gets a two-hour walk in the park, and if only one passerby says so much as "You're great!," well, that's "as it should be." MARY CHAPIN Carpenter is a rare superstar. Devoid of image, she's also smart enough to know that no image is itself a kind of image. She knows she needs to have a normal life in order to sing about normal life, and she knows that normal life these days means fighting to hold the center while being pulled in a million directions. She knows you've got to work hard, and she knows you've got to get lucky. In many ways, Carpenter knows she's sitting pretty, even as a woman who doesn't particularly like being alone at age 37. Most importantly, Carpenter knows how to put what she knows into songs that strike such a nerve with such a broad audience that she's become a standard-bearer of the new country-pop crossover, which in her case cuts both ways. This privileged Northeasterner, who was raised on the usual '60s-'70s mix of folk-rock-pop-soul, gravitated to acoustic country and became a singer-songwriter whose career hubs out of Nashville and flies in directions never open to Loretta Lynn's generation. Some people don't get it - what's a feminist Ivy Leaguer doing at the top of the country charts? - but a conversation in the park with Carpenter goes a long way toward clearing things up. She's just doing what comes naturally. If the phenomenon of her success defies expectations, there just might be something wrong with those expectations. It was a "happy accident," says Carpenter, that turned her musical hobby into a career. After graduating from Brown in 1981 with a degree in American Studies, she returned to Washington, where her family had moved from Princeton, N. J., while she was a teenager. During a period of post-graduate drift, she played clubs and coffeehouses as she had during college, but with gradually increasing intensity. "I'd play four sets a night and not play any of my songs, but things I liked, something I'd gotten from an old Billie Holiday record or Townes Van Zandt," she says. "I knew the music I liked was a bit more eclectic than your standard Top Forty acoustic bar stuff, but I also knew that stuff because I'd been playing in bars long enough." Growing up the daughter of a Time-Life executive and a school administrator, Carpenter had always "jotted things down," but, she says, "I first started getting fulfillment out of trying to write when I was fifteen or sixteen. "Being a teenager was tough. I wouldn't want to go back there for anything. I didn't have a lot of friends and I didn't feel I had the tools to make friends. I was too shy, I didn't feel secure, so I'd close myself in my room with my guitar and that was my outlet. I think back now, I'm so glad I had that because it helped me make sense of my world and gave me a lot of solace." In 1981, Carpenter met guitarist-producer John Jennings on the D. C. scene, and he encouraged her to work on her own music. Washington, where North meets South, has a rich acoustic music tradition. Bluegrass, one of Carpenter's passions, flourishes in and around our nation's capital; Emmylou Harris, very much Carpenter's antecedent as a worldly-wise country singer, got her start there. Carpenter found inspiration among the community of like-minded musicians, and over the course of a few years used any extra money she earned gigging and working as an administrative assistant to round up musicians and record some songs in Jennings' basement studio. "It was a labor of love, like a patchwork quilt," she says. "I was going to take this tape to my gigs and sell it out of my pocket." A friend who would become one of her managers offered to shop it to record labels for her, before she even knew what that meant. A year later, she had a deal with Columbia's Nashville division, which released the tape in 1987 as her debut album "Hometown Girl." In an apparent contradiction that would become a hallmark of her career (and signal the start of country's new cosmopolitan outlook), Music City had embraced a folk-styled artist from the confessional singer-songwriter school who leaned heavily toward piano ballads that limned the experiences of a career girl adrift, and whose idea of a cover version was a citified Tom Waits tune ("Downtown Train"). "No one ever said to me, well, we like what you do, but you better put a pedal steel on your record, or you better change your look or do this or that," says Carpenter. "At that time, there were a lot of other singer-songwriters who were finding [themselves] welcome there. I often have to dissect this for people because they say, `I listen to you and hear certain things I recognize as part of the country nomenclature or style, but I hear other things that I don't.' And I say that's something you'll find on most contemporary artists who are of a generation who grew up listening to a lot of different things." TRYING TO GET a verbal handle on the newly elastic concept of country eludes even Carpenter - "hot, new, neo-trad, progressive; you try to make sense out of it, I can't" - but she's quick to credit a couple of other artists who plowed the field she sowed. Randy Travis, for instance, "really brought a lot of substance back to what had become kind of fluffy." She talks about seeking out albums by the Texas school of literate singer-songwriters like Joe Ely, Butch Hancock, Willis Alan Ramsey, and of friends like Lucinda Williams (author of one of her biggest hits, "Passionate Kisses") and especially Rosanne Cash. "Rosanne had a higher profile as one of the few people who opened a door with her music and view of life and image for a lot of people who came after her, men and women. When she was married to Rodney [Crowell], there was this mythic quality of these two incredibly creative people, always on the edge artistically. I think they did a lot - this sounds cynical, but let's face it - they made it safe for people to like country music at a time when it was perhaps considered cliche-ridden and unimaginative." While resting at a picnic table, occasionally tossing Cal a doggie Frisbee, Carpenter acknowledges that while these other artists provide precedents and parallels to her own creative arc, no female among them has experienced the kind of exponential career growth that she (along with country music in general) has enjoyed over the last five years. Her second album "State of the Heart" placed three hit singles on both country and pop charts, making Carpenter a buzz artist. After the release of "Shooting Straight in the Dark" in October, 1990, her Cajun-flavored "Down at the Twist and Shout" became her breakthrough single, earning her her first Grammy for Best Country Female Vocal Performance. The album went gold. "Come On Come On" arrived in June of '92; it stayed on the charts for more than two years, spawned seven hit singles and sold in excess of 3 million copies. She won the Country Music Association's Female Vocalist of the Year Award, as she would the following year, a crowning endorsement by the Nashville establishment. The single "I Feel Lucky" won her another country female vocal performance Grammy. In 1994, "Passionate Kisses" won that award; "Shut Up and Kiss Me" won it this year. No other artist, male or female, has ever swept four in a row in the same category. Released in October of '94, "Stones in the Road" went platinum in two months, tying Wynonna's record for women by clinging to No. 1 on the country chart for five weeks. It then won the Grammy for Best Country Album in the category's first year. Cartwheels and backflips would be an entirely appropriate reaction to this recapitulation of astonishing accomplishment, but Carpenter plays it cool. Blase, almost. Asked to account for her success in some analytical way, she passes. "I'm the last person to have that perspective." Asked to respond viscerally, she responds simply. "The longevity, the shelf life, of `Come On Come On' surprised me." One senses her discomfort at talking about her success when she shifts out of the first-person for a low-key explanation of her work ethic: "Combined with incessant touring the last five years, ["Come On"] did a lot to raise your profile. We worked really hard, because to assume all those doors are always going to be open to you is irresponsible. Let's face it, it's not always going to be like this. Which is not to say, `Let's exploit it while we can,' but I'm in this place right now where good things are happening, and I'm happy to have a gig." Last year, Carpenter took time off to regroup and write "Stones in the Road." "It was the best thing I ever could have done just for myself," she says. Writing from early morning till 5 or 6 in a small apartment in northern Virginia, on a yellow legal pad with a guitar and a tape recorder, she came up with a suite of songs that represented something of a departure from the steady-rocking mid-tempo style that fueled her ascendance as a singles artist; "Shut Up and Kiss Me" was the only song to recapture that sort of sassy sexiness. "John Doe No. 24," on the other hand, a song prompted by an article about the death of a deaf, blind ward of the state, explored existential dislocation, as did songs about heartsickness and a couple of reminiscences bound to resonate with late-boomers old enough to remember the summer of '68 and feel yuppie malaise in the '90s. Carpenter rejects the critical observation that her songs speak particularly to people who share a similar socio-economic background, or that her music inhabits a psychic middle ground between the rural or smalltown landscape of traditional country and the harder-edged values of contemporary urban music. "Where did I get this `suburban' tag?" she wonders, citing reviews she has read. "I don't relate to that in any way. "The only song I've written that paints a portrait of where I see myself in terms of my generation, or about events that on a topical level have shaped me or my generation, is `Stones in the Road.' I'd like to believe that on the other songs the listener can come from anywhere, be a man or a woman, whatever sexual orientation they have is irrelevant, how much money they make is irrelevant - it speaks to the spirit more than anything else." Certainly, Carpenter has a gift for evoking universal feelings of longing; she sings wistfully about the notion of "home," and a great many of her relationship songs are postmortems. "I guess I am the architect of my isolation," she says. "I tend to retreat, but there's two kinds of aloneness: One is the kind you seek and the other is the kind that's imposed on you, and the stuff that's imposed on you is the painful kind. But sometimes I don't feel I have the wherewithal to break out of that. "It's hard. And it's painful. Yet it's very much a part of me, and I've always felt it from the first day I can remember. I've always fought loneliness in some fashion." At 37, Carpenter says she pays intermittent attention to the ticktock of the biological clock. "I will feel sad if I pass the point where I can have kids. Within the last six months, I broke up with a guy I'd been seeing a long time. The failure of that relationship brings you back to ground zero, reassessing. Okay, my expectations for that are down the tubes, what do I do now? "I want a family, I do, but I just haven't met the right guy, and it's hard to meet people. I oftentimes have thoughts that maybe I'm never going to meet the right person because I'm kind of shy and have a hard time feeling the confidence that perhaps is required to meet guys. On top of that, I travel so much that I'm never very long somewhere, so how're you gonna meet 'em?" Carpenter measures her speech carefully, and since she doesn't entirely trust the interview process, feels compelled to ask, "Please don't write this like whiny. It's not meant as a whiny thing." Not at all, she is promised; in fact, one of the most appealing aspects of her music is that for all her sensitivity to sad feelings, she retains a strong enough vision of love that despair never enters her voice. "Those are just the songs I put on the record," she laughs. "There's lots of songs that don't make the record that are self-pitying and ooohh God." Despite the barrage of celebrity misery in the media, people whose lives are more mundane than those of international recording stars still might find it hard to swallow that fame and wealth don't necessarily equal satisfaction. But Carpenter, pointing to astronomical touring expenses, says she doesn't even know whether she has wealth. Still, success has allowed her to make key adjustments in her lifestyle. She recently bought a house ("a spiritually very important thing") in one of Washington's most precious neighborhoods, and she's in a position to take every third week off during her present nine-and-a-half month tour. Furthermore, a newly awakened sense of political engagement enables her to support issues - the environment, women's causes and literacy - that give her a sense of community and fulfillment. Every once in a while, Carpenter fields a question about the parameters of her popularity, which despite her inroads to the pop mainstream does not include heavy rotation on MTV or VH1. For all the success, is there anything she's disappointed about in her career? "Frankly," she answers, "I feel like I've been able to do everything I've wanted to do artistically, so why would I be unhappy?" And just the previous day, she'd experienced a small epiphany that helped put things in perspective. Backstage at Earth Day "there was a kid over the fence I signed a few things for, and he said, `Are you happy?' It was like a stranger just asking me, `Are you happy?' "I said, `Oh, yes,' and I really felt it. It was nice to say that."
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