Mary Chapin Carpenter Goes Back to Basics with ‘Age of Miracles’

Mary Chapin Carpenter's new album 'The Age of Miracles' highlights the artist's gifts as a singer-songwriter rather than the hitmaker she was in the '90s.

What I have always loved about Mary Chapin Carpenter is that her music comes across as an authentic representation of who she really is at her core; at its best, it never sounds manufactured, pretentious, or striving.

She has never appeared on album covers with that come-hither look that so many female artists use to sell their material, and has only infrequently presented her fans with music that felt like a joint musician – marketing department effort.

Mary Chapin Carpenter

When I looked around to see what others thought of the album, I came upon an interview with Carpenter by Jesse Kornbluth. Kornbluth says he doesn’t hear any song on the new album that has that self-consciously manufactured “hit” quality to it, except perhaps one. Carpenter’s response:

“Looking back twenty years, perhaps the greatest struggle throughout is the struggle to be authentic. In the ’90s, when I was having great success and things were crazy as could be, there was pressure — sometimes spoken, sometimes not — not to do this or that. And I thought: who am I? The hardest time during those years was when I said “yes” to something that didn’t feel authentic to me. But that is how you learn too. I had a wonderful career with Sony, but they needed to get records on the charts. Since I started recording for Rounder, that kind of pressure has disappeared.”

Carpenter’s biggest radio hits are what brought her fame and fortune, but they were never the “meat” of her work. She is a reflective, soulful singer-songwriter to the core. Her guitar work is impressive for its mastery of simplicity. She never moves beyond a basic comfort zone with the instrument, but she’s mastered what she does well; her strumming and picking style are strong, and she lets the fantastic session guitarist Duke Levine create moods around her melodies.

At 52, Carpenter writes about topics that would likely not be on the mind of someone half her age: her return to health after a pulmonary embolism three years ago; the joys and struggles of marriage and intimacy; the non-violent protests of Buddhist monks in Burma.

I am happy that Carpenter now has the luxury to focus only on her music without the pressure of creating “hits.” Fortunately, that is what the most loyal and supportive fans respond to anyway.