Mary Chapin Carpenter
Mary Chapin Carpenter[a] (born February 21, 1958) is an American country and folk music singer-songwriter. Carpenter spent several years singing in Washington, D.C.-area clubs before signing in the late 1980s with Columbia Records. Carpenter's first album, 1987's Hometown Girl, did not produce any charting singles. She broke through with 1989's State of the Heart and 1990's Shooting Straight in the Dark.
Mary Chapin Carpenter
February 21, 1958
- Singer
- songwriter
- Vocals
- acoustic guitar
1987–present
- Columbia Nashville
- Zoë
- Lambent Light/Thirty Tigers
Carpenter's most successful album is 1992's Come On Come On, which accounted for seven singles and was certified quadruple platinum in the United States for shipments of four million copies. Her follow up album, Stones in the Road, appeared two years later and won Carpenter the Grammy Award for Best Country Album, while going double platinum for shipments of two million copies. After a number of commercially unsuccessful albums throughout the first decade of the 21st century, she exited Columbia for Zoë Records. Her first album for this label was 2007's The Calling. She recorded several albums for Zoë until launching her own Lambent Light label in 2015.
Carpenter has won five Grammy Awards, from 18 nominations, including four consecutive wins in the category of Best Female Country Vocal Performance between 1992 and 1995. She has charted 27 times on the Billboard Hot Country Songs charts, with her 1994 single "Shut Up and Kiss Me" representing her only number-one single there. Her musical style takes influence from contemporary country and folk, with many of her songs including feminist themes. While largely composed of songs she wrote herself or with longtime producer John Jennings, her discography includes covers of Gene Vincent, Lucinda Williams, and Dire Straits, among others.
Early life[edit]
Mary Chapin Carpenter was born February 21, 1958, in Princeton, New Jersey.[2] Her father, Chapin Carpenter Jr., was an executive for Life magazine.[3] When she was 12 years old, the family moved to Tokyo, Japan, and lived there for about two years, as her father was looking to begin an Asian edition of Life.[4] Her mother, Mary Bowie Robertson,[5] was a folk music singer and guitarist. As a child, Carpenter learned to play her mother's ukulele and classical guitar in addition to writing songs.[6] She was also inspired by her seventh-grade science teacher, who was a guitarist as well.[4] After her family moved to Washington, D.C., in 1974, Carpenter played folk venues in the area. She attended Brown University, from which she graduated with a degree in American civilization.[2] She began performing cover songs at the folk venues, but by 1981 she had added original material.[2] She befriended John Jennings, a songwriter, instrumentalist, and record producer. The two began collaborating and put together a demo cassette of several of Carpenter's songs which she sold at concerts.[2]
Musical career[edit]
1987–1991: Early years with Columbia Records[edit]
Jennings had originally planned to sign Carpenter to an independent label, but the owner of a Washington, D.C. nightclub submitted some of Carpenter's demos to a representative of Columbia Records' Nashville division. This led to her signing with that label in 1987, only two days before she was slated to sign the contract with the other independent label.[7] Columbia released her debut album Hometown Girl in 1987.[7] The label hyphenated her first name as "Mary-Chapin" to indicate that it was a compound given name and lessen the possibility of her being referred to as just Mary. Her albums would continue to punctuate her name in this fashion until 1994.[1] Of the ten songs on Hometown Girl, Carpenter wrote or co-wrote eight. The two exceptions were "Come On Home" and a cover of Tom Waits' "Downtown Train".[7] She had also recorded John Stewart's "Runaway Train" with the intent of including it on the album, but Columbia removed this song because Rosanne Cash had also recorded it and wanted to issue it as a single.[8] Jennings played guitar, synthesizer, piano, bass guitar, and mandolin on the album, while Mark O'Connor contributed on fiddle and Tony Rice on acoustic guitar. Musician Jon Carroll played piano and also provided percussion by shaking a Cream of Wheat can.[9] While the album did not produce any charting singles,[10] it received word of mouth attention in folk music circles, which led to her being booked to perform at the Philadelphia Folk Festival in addition to serving as an opening act for Emmylou Harris.[11][7]
Because of her first album's commercial failure, Carpenter sought to make her next one more appealing to country radio.[10] She charted for the first time in early 1989 with "How Do", which ascended to number 19 on the Billboard Hot Country Songs charts.[12] The song served as the lead single to her second Columbia album, State of the Heart.[11] The album charted three more singles between 1989 and 1990. First was "Never Had It So Good", a song which Carpenter wrote with Jennings. By the end of 1989, this became her first top-ten hit on Billboard.[12] After it were "Quittin' Time" (co-written by Robb Royer and Roger Linn) and "Something of a Dreamer", which Carpenter wrote by herself.[12] William Ruhlmann of AllMusic thought that Carpenter was "still in transition" between the folk influences of her debut and the more mainstream country sounds of her later albums.[13] She won Top New Female Vocalist from the Academy of Country Music in 1989.[14] At the 33rd Annual Grammy Awards in 1991, "Quittin' Time" was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Female Country Vocal Performance.[15]
Musical style[edit]
Carpenter's music is defined by her folk music influences and lyrical focus. Erlewine wrote that Carpenter "found favor on country radio in the 1980s and '90s by taking her emotionally intelligent songs to a mass audience."[2] Of her 1980s albums, he stated that "Country radio was hesitant to play her soft, folky, feminist material, but she received good reviews and airplay on more progressive country stations, as well as college radio".[2] In the Virgin Encyclopedia of Country Music, Colin Larkin noted the use of electric guitar in her more upbeat material such as "Passionate Kisses" and "The Hard Way", while also referring to "House of Cards" as "thought-provoking".[8] He also stated, "she, together with the likes of Trisha Yearwood, Suzy Bogguss, and Kathy Mattea, has brought fresh melody to an old and sometimes predictable genre."[8] Larry Katz of the Red Deer Advocate contrasted her with Yearwood and Wynonna Judd, noting that unlike those artists, Carpenter usually wrote her songs herself instead of relying on Nashville-based songwriters.[1] Alanna Nash of Entertainment Weekly thought that by being a graduate of an Ivy League college, Carpenter "seemed the least likely female to go the distance on the country charts".[23] Similarly, Katz thought that her upbringing was atypical of country music, which is more commonly associated with demographics pertaining to the rural Southern United States.[1]
Nash also noted the difference between "decidedly noncountry themes like Halley’s Comet and the spiritual life of old shirts" in contrast to her more up-tempo material such as "Down at the Twist and Shout".[23] In a review of Stones in the Road for the same publication, Browne contrasted that album with Come On Come On, saying of the latter that "her square-jawed voice, leaner lyrics, and the sturdy-as-a-wooden-fence folk rock combined to make a deserved[...]breakthrough."[87] He also said of her writing style that Carpenter "sounds like someone who sits down and thinks about it — a lot — before committing it to song. Not since the heyday of Gordon Lightfoot has a singer-songwriter been so damn reasonable."[87] Mike DeGagne of AllMusic said of Carpenter's lyrics that she "portray[s] maturely the perils of romance and heartbreak from a female perspective".[16] Writing for American Songwriter, Deborah Evans Price noted themes of feminism due to many of her songs being about single women attempting to overcome setbacks in her life; of this, Carpenter stated that "I've just been kind of writing for me."[4] Similarly, Nash stated that many of the songs on Shooting Straight in the Dark featured women protagonists who "take matters into their own hands".[88] Eli Messinger of Country Standard Time described her singing voice as having "empathic clarity and force", particularly on "Passionate Kisses" and "He Thinks He'll Keep Her". He also stated that the former song had a theme of "desire", and the latter a "call to self-fulfillment".[39] Keefe found influences of folk and country pop in her 1990s albums, but thought that much of her work in the 21st century was "mixed" due to a lack of uptempo material and lyrical themes which he considered too similar to each other. He described the stronger tracks on these albums as appealing to adult album alternative formats.[56]
Personal life[edit]
Carpenter was unmarried for most of her recording career. In a 1994 profile, Dana Kennedy of Entertainment Weekly referred to Carpenter as "a spokes-singer for the thirtysomething single woman".[89] On June 1, 2002, she married Timmy Smith, a general contractor then working in Batesville, Virginia. Actress Sissy Spacek and singer Dave Matthews were in attendance at the wedding.[90] By 2007, the couple lived on a farm outside Charlottesville, Virginia.[52] The couple divorced shortly before the release of Ashes and Roses (2012), at which point Carpenter continued to live on the farm. That album's track "What to Keep and What to Throw Away" was inspired by her divorce from Smith.[59]
Carpenter was the author of four columns in The Washington Times from December 2008 to March 2009, in which she discussed topics related to music and politics.[91] Ben Walsh of The Independent cited this, along with her involvements in various charities, as examples of Carpenter's liberal political leanings.[66] Relatedly, she told The Buffalo News in 1995 that she considered herself to be politically liberal; she also stated that "it seems as if the Republicans co-opted the entire country music community. In fact, a lot of country artists are Democrats."[29]
Carpenter has released sixteen studio albums between 1987 and 2020.[2]
