By Larry Schwartz
SHE’S a big star. She’s won five Grammy awards. She’s had four number one singles, two platinum albums and one triple-platinum. And still they call her Mary.
“You get on the phone sometimes and they go, `Hello Mary’,” the singer-songwriter explains. “And you go, `Actually, no. My first name is Mary Chapin’.”
A publicist had warned that Mary Chapin Carpenter would not take kindly to being wrongly addressed. So I’d taken the coward’s approach to interviewing and dropped the question towards the end.
“Oh no, you wouldn’t annoy me,” says Carpenter, who hyphenated Mary-Chapin in the late 1980s then removed the hyphen at the suggestion of her record company. “I just wanted to get it straight, that’s all. It’s just like Mary Beth or Mary Jane.”
From Princeton, New Jersey, Carpenter was hailed as a major talent from the time her first album, Hometown Girl, appeared in 1987. A leading country music critic wrote in the Tennessean that she was “one of the great songwriting discoveries”.
Carpenter started out performing on the Washington bar circuit after graduating from Brown in the early 1980s with a degree in American civilisation (“that’s just another term for history and literature,” she says).
She is the third eldest of four daughters of Chapin and Bowie Carpenter. Her mother worked in secondary schools, her father was an executive with Life. The family lived in Japan for a while, when her father became publishing director of the magazine’s Asian edition.
Carpenter credits her parents with instilling a love of music at an early age. “My father is a very musical person in that he loves jazz and all sorts of things, and my mother had a love of all things classical and opera. We had a lot of music in our house growing up.
“I loved to sing, always. I loved to pick out songs on the guitar and the piano. It wasn’t really until I got out of college that I started trying to pay my rent with gigs around town. Both my parents were extraordinarily supportive of it.”
Carpenter has enjoyed hits with others’ songs, notably Lucinda Williams’ Passionate Kisses (from her fourth album, Come On Come On), a song that went gold (500,000 copies) within a month of its release in 1992.
But she has penned the bulk of 17 tracks on her new compilation of hits, live tracks and rarities, Party Doll and Other Favorites, that celebrates her career to date.
In 1997 Columbia Records suggested a greatest hits record. Carpenter held back and instead came up with a collection that includes hits, a theme song from the film Fly Away Home, and live performances.
“I felt that it was not only an opportunity, but my obligation to myself and to all the people who have been so supportive, to have my fingerprints all over this project,” she says. “To hand it over to an anonymous person at the record company to compile and not have anything to do with it seemed perverse to me.”
Carpenter arrives in town this week to perform an acoustic-style show, backed only by her long-time co-producer, guitar and bass-player John Jennings, and John Carroll on keyboards. “One of the reasons people like her,” Jennings once said of Carpenter, “is because they feel she is speaking plainly about what she feels without trying to dilute it”.
Sometimes described as a folk-country performer, Carpenter has come a long way from her debut album. Did she notice a distinct artistic growth and change in production values over the years while she was compiling Party Doll?
“Oh, God I hope so,” she says. “You’ve got to start from some place. I look back on that first record in particular with a great deal of affection. But it seems very unsophisticated. I’m not ashamed of it in any way. I just figure that every time you have a chance to make a record, it’s a chance to push yourself a little harder, a little out of your safe places.”
It’s not an approach she applies only to music, either. Carpenter has been a politically active Democrat since her high school days. She is involved in environmental, literacy and other organisations.
Despite her popularity as a country performer, she once said she “felt insecure about fitting into any kind of category”, and she is mindful of the assertion that these days there are at least two different Nashvilles – that of the pop charts and the likes of Shania Twain, and that of the bluegrass tradition.
To which camp does she belong? “I haven’t a clue. I certainly don’t feel anything but love and respect and affection for a lot of musicians who live on both sides of the street in Nashville. But as far as where I fit in, I don’t know. I don’t think I could be the best judge of that.”
The Sunday Age, 16-Apr-2000
Larry Schwartz Writer 