Songwriters often fall into one of two camps: those for whom the words are the point and those where the music drives the lyrics. Country/folk singer Mary Chapin Carpenter is a woman with something to say. She may often play buoyant beats and driving rhythms that leave her listeners dancing in the aisles, but underneath the sound there's usually a message of substance.
"Lyrics jump-start a song most of the time," she says in a phone interview from Santa Fe, the latest stop in her "Bones in the Road" tour. "Sometimes, something strikes you and you start scribbling. Other times you're riffing off an emotion and editing makes it clearer later on."
Friendly despite this being just one of several 15-minute interviews in a row--this "star" even answers the phone herself!--Carpenter has a writing method as down-to-earth and simple as many of her more soulful melodies. No synthesizer or computer for her. She just sits at a desk with a pad and pencil, guitar in her lap, and begins "playing and writing at the same time."
It's a process that is filled with surprises. Sometimes Carpenter begins assuming that a particular song, due to its subject matter, should be played in an upbeat tempo. "For whatever reason halfway through I say, 'Uh-uh,'" she says, and the piece turns instead into a ballad.
Carpenter enjoys these unexpected bumps in the creative road. Indeed, unlike many--okay, most of us--Carpenter also enjoys editing. "I self edit for days," she says. "It's a pleasurable thing."
It's a formula that has brought Carpenter impressive success in the 11 years since her debut album, Hometown Girl. Her follow-up album two years later, State of the Heart, had two top-ten singles, helped earn her recognition by the Academy of Country Music as the top new female vocalist and won her a nomination for her first Grammy for Best Country Vocal Performance/Female.
Carpenter's fourth album,Come on, Come On, guaranteed her place as one of country music's reigning queens as she won three Grammy Awards and had seven singles at the top of Billboard's charts. "He Thinks He'll Keep Her" was nominated in 1995 for Record of the Year, only second time in Grammy history that a nomination in this category has gone to a country artist.
Carpenter's 1994, Stones in the Road, brought her another Grammy for Best Country Performance/ Female, making her the only country artist to win four Grammys in a row for same category. Her most recent album, A Place in the World, brought Carpenter a Grammy in the country category for the searing single "Let Me Into Your Heart."
With no current hit singles, not even on the country stations that helped propel her to stardom, Carpenter is in a bit of a lull right now. While that situation might find lesser performers nervously looking over their shoulders, wondering if they're already has-beens in a business always looking for the next young star, Carpenter, 39, is remarkably blasÚ. Sure, more air time would be nice. "That's a no-brainer," she says. "I would want as many people as possible to hear what I'm doing. [But] I don't make plans according to what I hear on the radio."
"The entertainment business is a very cyclical thing," she adds. "Every few years this is The Year of the Woman. It doesn't mean anything. I try not to pay attention to it."
Instead, Carpenter feels grateful. With no new album and very little airplay this year as a result, Carpenter still plays to sell-out crowds. "To be able to sell a ticket without airplay, it's harder to do," she says. "I'm grateful for a fan base I've been able to nurture."
While some musicians say they always knew this is where they'd end up, Carpenter insists she's surprised by her life. "I had no ambition to do music," she says. "It's a shocker. I feel pretty blessed it turned out this way."
Carpenter, who began playing guitar as a second-grader, first started playing at open mics as an 18-year-old in her hometown of Washington, DC. "It thrilled me," she says. "It was scary but I liked it."
About a year later she convinced a local bar to hire her. That's when she began throwing in a few original tunes to the musical mix. "I always had written them, but I didn't feel brave enough to play them." Trying out her tunes in a bar setting--where Carpenter admits she was "part of the furniture"--was the perfect place to get some audience reaction.
The reaction was, for the most part, positive. So, after graduating from Brown University, Carpenter just kept on playing.
After so many years on the road, no one would blame Carpenter for being a little tired of road life. She isn't, however. Indeed, with no new album to promote the only reason Carpenter is traversing America this summer is because she likes to do it. "Would I rather be sitting at home in hot muggy D.C. or playing here?" she says, describing the view from her Santa Fe hotel window and talking about playing the week before in Telluride, Colorado. The answer is obvious in her voice.
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