Mary Chapin Carpenter

Listen to a few bars of The Age of Miracles, and if you are at all familiar with Mary Chapin Carpenter, you should recognise it as one of her songs, for her musical fingermarks are as individual as her striking lyrics. Mary Chapin rightly describes her style as ‘eclectic.’ Although too young to be part of the Greenwich Village folk revival of the 1960s, she was inspired by it to take up first the ukulele and then her mother’s gut-stringed guitar. She makes a notable contribution to the recent 429 Records album THE VILLAGE, singing Eric Andersen’s Violets Of Dawn.
It is, however, the Tennessee twang of modern country that has coloured her stream of successful recordings—now amounting to sales of over 13 million. And it was back to Nashville that Carpenter went to record her latest disc THE AGE OF MIRACLES, with a core band of Duke Levine on guitars, Glenn Worf on bass, Russ Kunkel on drums, Eric Darken on percussion and co-producer Matt Rollings at the piano.
For all their vividness, Carpenter’s songs seldom yield up all their secrets at one hearing. This, her twelfth album counting PARTY DOLL AND OTHER FAVORITES (not your conventional compilation disc) and the festive COME DARKNESS, COME LIGHT (no ordinary Christmas offering), is full of memories, poetic evocations, references both private and historical.
The apparent straightforwardness of Carpenter’s verbal and musical structures is deceptive. “I threw out far more than I kept. But little by little, ideas and themes and feelings and melodies started to stitch themselves together, and the soul of what would become this record began to reveal itself.” THE AGE OF MIRACLES testifies to “the spirit of humanity ... an overcoming in the face of unspeakable tragedy.”
The title song mirrors Carpenter’s shimmering “maybe world”—a mix of things that have happened and of what might yet happen “in a curious place between hope and desire.” The Age of Miracles, she explains, “pulls together many threads, personal and universal ... the moon landing, monks in Burma and peaceful protest, the confusion of Hurricane Katrina ... examples of courage that one can apply to one’s own life.”
Burmese monks are not the only oriental figures in THE AGE OF MIRACLES. Having lived in Japan for two years as a schoolgirl, Carpenter remains keenly interested in the Far East. In her song 4 June 1989, the ‘I’ of the lyric is “the artist and activist Chen Guang, who was profiled in the New York Times in the days just before the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.”