There’s an exquisite melancholy to such songs which deal in the currency of real emotions to which we can all relate. There’s no shortage in her back catalogue of up-beat numbers ("Down at the Twist and Shout", “Shut Up and Kiss Me”, “Why Walk Can You Can Fly”) but the songs at which she excels (and which she says she most enjoys singing) are the slow, meditative ones, many of them (“John Doe No 24”, “The Rhythm of the Blues”, “The Things That We Are Made Of”) dealing with profound subject matter. She’s the perfect singer-songwriter for this time, and any time, the “grain” of her deep voice, with its subtle vibrato, drawing you irrevocably in and the intelligence of her lyrics ensuring that repeated listenings rarely fail to reveal new layers of meaning. I can’t figure it out.”Ĭarpenter talks easily yet precisely, speaking in that rich, liquid caramel and perfectly modulated voice that makes her singing so beguiling. Some days the bad news doesn’t stop me in my tracks and other days it’s so heavy, so bad. And if I think about it too much it’s completely overwhelming. She worries that “a lot of people are going to be lost to it, their careers and their potential. She assumes music will be “the very, very last thing to come back” and that’s difficult for “musicians of whatever altitude”. So I kept a few anchor dates and Wolf Trap I didn’t white out.” The performing arts centre that’s a key summer date for Carpenter and so many of her fellow troubadours is down route 267 from her home. Then I thought – anticipated – that I’d be curious as the months went on where I would have been.
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“I was going to clear everything off the calendar. “We pencil in, we cancel out”, as she sang all those years ago in “Stones in the Road”, except all those concert dates were inked in a long time ago. She is totally in the moment, making a real connection across the miles – whether with the thousands who tune in every few days, accepting an invitation to step in to her home and her life, however briefly, or with me now, as we laugh at the things we both share: an “old school” adherence to Filofax and with “the old white-out”, so necessary as our lives are remade. She is simply herself, which is why Songs from Home has been both consolation and success. Talking to her feels like chatting to an old friend, though not because she exudes false bonhomie. There are some things against which even five Grammys can’t armour you. Read the good ones and you have also to read the bad ones she explains, and it’s easy to understand that someone who’s talked openly of depression and “imposter syndrome” might not want to do that. The Dirt and the Stars has been out for a couple of weeks and is enjoying deservedly good reviews, not that Carpenter checks them out. “But I do have my pride and my standards and I don’t want people seeing my dirty dishes! So I make a little bit of an effort to spruce it up.” The response has been so heartening, and people just saying that gives me a few minutes' respite from all the awful stuff.” Recording the songs has given her life “a sort of structure” – and no, she volunteers, her kitchen isn’t always that clean and tidy.
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The idea of putting up the phone, and playing into the phone, which is all I have, and posting it, sort of on a wing on a prayer. I wanted to do something that would stop me walking in circles, because that was all I was doing. I just wanted to do something… It sounds like conceit and I don’t mean it this way. “I remember I was walking in circles in my house. She’d not long returned from Britain, where she’d recorded her latest album, The Dirt and The Stars, the unfolding nightmare just a couple of weeks old.
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The series was “completely unplanned” Carpenter tells me from her kitchen table in the beautiful old Virginia farmhouse now so familiar from the videos. Carpenter’s 35th Song from Home, “Lafayette”, was a new song by playwright Benjamin Scheuer about recent events in Washington DC, and this weekend’s, the 37th, was her own “Twilight”. Three days later, she sang “Soul Companion”, she and Angus joined by White Kitty – a blind and deaf 17-year-old Rag Doll rescue who offers only the occasional guest spot. Many musicians have brought their art direct into our homes, but I suspect Mary Chapin Carpenter has touched more hearts than most with her series of Songs from Home which began on 18 March with “Edinburgh” and which introduced us to Carpenter’s co-star and “producer” Angus, an elegant young Golden Retriever.