Mary Chapin Carpenter – The Dirt and the Stars
Lambent Light Records – 7 August 2020
Recorded live at Peter Gabriel’s Real World studios, this is Mary Chapin Carpenter’s first collection of new material since 2016. The Dirt and the Stars is a reflective, melodically gentle that she says is based around notions of ‘becoming’ and, as such, built around a picked guitar and understated keys. Farther Along And Further In opens proceedings with her singing of a shift, a turning “a crack in the armor, an opening/My heart seeing out and my eyes see in/Where they’ve never seen before“, a song about seeing “kindred eyes in a stranger’s face” and of opening up and “finally listening/To some kind of spirit murmuring” as, perhaps echoing Joni Mitchell, she notes “We’re atoms and stardust circling catching the light then we’re gone again“.
That exploration of coming to terms equally informs the chugging rhythm line, steady drumbeat and circling keyboard pattern of It’s OK To Feel Sad, a song which, in the lines “You won’t always feel bad …These feelings like weather, they come and they go” essentially say this too shall pass and that unless you acknowledge the hurt, then you cannot begin the healing or, as she puts it, “the cracks beginning to spread is the way you break open“.
It’s also one of two otherwise radio-friendly tracks where she drops in the f-bomb, the other being the chords cascading Secret Keepers, a number about how holding on to secrets you should let go of will ultimately drag you down (“it’s fucked you up every which way“), of “camouflaging shame” and the invisible scars that can eventually cripple and control, unfolding into a call for compassion and to “spare a little kindness when you meet someone/You never really know what they’re carrying around… Is it a live grenade or a loaded gun“.
Featuring meditative piano and a slow walking muted drum beat, All Broken Hearts Break Differently is pretty much self-explanatory about how we deal with hurt and loss when relationships fall apart, “Some crash and burn, some go quietly…. Some slip the chains/Some throw away the key” but how “like truth to dare and push to shove/We risk everything when it comes to love.” But better to “wring your hands” than “a dream not chased, pages still unturned“.
It’s a mood that carried over into the similar low key Old D-35, a song titled for a distinctive Martin guitar, though here it more concerns fond memories (“before we knew how much we’d lose“) in its repeated line opener “as long as…” (“…you and I are standing in a photograph in a frame… there’s still time and room to chase it…. you appear in my dreams/To show me how it was“), striking both a note of defiance (“As long as I am here to shake a fist/At the universe above“) and the comfort of knowing “We find the one we’re meant for/if we’re truly meant to be/As if fate’s in charge and all we have to do is call on destiny“. Reflections of the past set to echoes of notes in old songs and old guitars.
The striking exception to the laid back wistfulness and introspection comes with the six-minute American Stooge, the organ and drums laying down a funky Southern bluesy groove at a speak-sing dig at those who buy into the American way, who when they come to the fork in the road with “power on his left, conscience on his right” put themselves first (“to hell with the truth, he’s sucking up to the dude“), and “When he’s not kissing the ring and leveling threats/He’s proud to be your favorite hypocrite“.
It’s pointedly followed by Where the Beauty Is, a Janis Ian/James Taylor sounding cocktail which somewhat echoes earlier themes of moving beyond someone’s surface because “there’s so much we don’t understand” and finding the truth below as she sings “The mark upon your skin revealed/Where injury and pain were sealed/But a scar’s the place where you were healed/That’s where the beauty is“.
The gentle star-kissed, quietly fingerpicked, piano-accompanied Nocturne returns to memories, underscored with a lyric about growing older as she sketches a poignant picture of a man reflecting on his life in the still of the night (“You thought of your children just down the stairs/Your wife sleeping deeply, the quotidian cares/some days it’s easy, some days it’s hard/ some days it’s so hard to be loved“), thinking back on his father (“You wish he’d been around more when you were a kid/You wish he had told you so much more than he did/And all these regrets and they’re still handed down/from father to son somehow“) and “trying to see/ What’s waiting for you at the end of your days/the wars you inherit, the truces you make/the riches you squandered, the love that you earned” and how “We’re all trying to live up to some oath to ourselves“.
Another piano ballad, Asking For A Friend contemplates how you bring a relationship to an end when it’s no longer working (“When there’s nothing left to say, how do you say it“) and “you’ve been trying but no longer can pretend“. It’s heavy with an unresolved sadness, as captured in the title, as the narrator seeks to reassure “Don’t worry there’s nobody else/I know I haven’t been myself/I guess I’m just wondering aloud” and that she’s just “reaching for some words that help/To lead us back to how we felt/The things love has always been about“. There’s a particular poignancy from the songwriter’s perspective in the final line – “Will this song always remind me/when I play it“.
The universality of the feelings that suffuse the album is captured in the penultimate twinklingly picked lullaby of Everybody’s Got Something (“Some are wishing they were someone else/Some just want to be by themselves/Some are trying to tear it down/Some are shaky on solid ground/Some confuse guilt and blame/They can’t admit when they feel ashamed… Some are dying to be loved/Some are hiding what they’re frightened of/Some will breach every vow/Some will always feel lost somehow“) again underscored by the comfort that dark clouds of depression, of hurt, of loss of faith or self, will pass and that “a light comes shining to stitch and mend/One day you’ll find you’re you again“—the last chorus taking on a first-person reassurance.
It ends bringing that journey of emotional recovery to a positive conclusion slowly unfolding and building to an uplifting guitar solo climax with the soulful seven-minute Between The Dirt And The Stars, opening with the recollection “I’m 17 and in a car, ready to ride anywhere/This summer night sticks to my skin/And the beer’s gone to my head” and moves on to how dreams and hearts can be broken as (not quite hearing him over the radio) her boyfriend dumps her and drives off (“All I hear is a distant car/watching the fading light between the dirt and the stars“), the song speaking of how music (in this case apparently The Stones’ Wild Horses) can help you both channel the hurt (“Everything that broke your heart/Whatever called you by your soul/And piece by piece took you apart“) and help you heal (“years will pass before we learn/What time denies to everyone/And if we’re lucky ghosts and prayers/Are company not enemies“) because “all the faith love robbed you of/Every light the dark erased…everything you’ll ever know is in the choruses“. Just turn on the radio in your heart and soul.
A slow burn album that mingles confusion and clarity, despair and determination, “in brokenness we are whole,” she sings. Mary Chapin Carpenter will put you together again.
https://www.marychapincarpenter.com/
photo credit: Aaron Farrington