NASHVILLE - Mary Chapin Carpenter often is perceived as a country-music intellectual, and the Brown University graduate has even been called the genre's poet laureate.
Such terms do not speak to the hearts of most country-music listeners.
But Carpenter's warm, conversational vocals and the emotional bull's-eyes of her songs generally have bridged any gaps between the singer and her diverse audiences.
And unlike many of her colleagues, she is not one to talk your ear off, particularly in an interview. Her personal life is, well, just that.
She's more comfortable discussing her life's work but tussles with her words, letting them out and then calling them back before finally stringing them together perfectly.
"My work helps me have an identity, which helps me feel like I have a place, which makes me feel like I have a purpose," she says.
Thus her sixth album, A Place in the World, comes by its name quite naturally, and half its songs, including the title track and Hero in Your Own Hometown, wrestle with place and identity and "mine the vein of the past," as Carpenter puts it.
So far, such serious musings interspersed with outbreaks of jollity in such hits as Shut Up and Kiss Me and I Feel Lucky have earned her four Grammys and big album sales.
Her new release also includes a sensual departure-all very civilized, of course-in What If We Went to Italy, in which she realizes that if the ancients were lazy like us they'd be too blissed out to paint, to sketch or to sculpt.
Another song, Ideas Are Like Stars, pays homage to Joseph Carroll, a reclusive artist whose rich inner life is conveyed in works now housed at the National Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C., Carpenter's longtime stomping ground. "There's a loneliness in his work and yet an affirming quality that I felt very drawn to."
Her songwriting came first, then performing, which caused her to be "paralyzed with fear" when she first stepped onto the open-mike stages around Washington.
"Performing is like a different muscle, a different food group, a different impulse."
Eventually, the two crafts merged as she began to add her own material to her playlist, "throwing a song in here and there and hoping nobody would notice. Which they didn't."
What tends to be overlooked, she says, is her guitar playing, "which is as much a focus for me as singing." She plays on her albums and plays up to 10 different guitars in concert, mostly due to the individual tunings her songs need.
After an instrumental buildup that began with the bass ukulele she played as a child, she purchased her dream Martin guitar as a college freshman.
"It was an unbelievable rite of passage. I think anybody who plays guitar understands that. I think it cost me $1,100, and it was sort of the pinnacle, especially in the bluegrass circles I was traveling in."
Today, Carpenter, 38, increasingly is branching out. She has written a children's book, Dreamland, and become known as a supporter of human rights organizations.
She's now contemplating an all-acoustic album. Her longtime musical partner and coproducer, John Jennings, who has his own album due in January, "is always kind of kicking me to expand my horizons." And "there's a real satisfaction in doing (outside) projects that kind of "feed the art monster."
Carpenter says she's unable to keep up with the influx of new performers. "I'm unaware; I feel like an old fart. And I can't keep up with pop either."
In fighting the pack, she says, she's luckier than some, since "I've never been able to take radio airplay for granted," whereas some careers are dependent upon radio play.
The new competition, she says, "hopefully will result in really superlative songs and performances. I still believe that a really good song will succeed. You can't keep a good song down."