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  Lexington Herald Leader - Found Jul. 2, 2009 ?I mean, there is no Mary Chapin Carpenter, no Emmylou Harris on country radio right now filling that void. I would like to do that. In Focus: Buddy Holly - MSN Movies A half-true history of Shelton Hank Williams - INDY Cowpunks, metalheads can enjoy Hank III - Charleston Post and Courier Heir apparent to the country throne, Holly Williams performing at ... - Examiner.com Explore All

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• Maura O?Connell Remains a Nashville Treasure

  Country Music Television - Found Jun. 22, 2009 She's been making records for about 25 years now, drawing upon stellar songwriters such as Mary Chapin Carpenter, Patty Griffin, John Hiatt and...

• CD Reviews: Nanci Griffith, Sonic Youth, Black Eyed Peas, Sarah ...

  Milwaukee Journal Sentinel - Found Jun. 9, 2009 One of the things that separates Griffith from other smart country queens such as Emmylou Harris or Mary Chapin Carpenter is the sense of place... High school track: Relentless attitude earned Griffith award - South Bend Tribune Explore All

• Holly Williams, Big Star, Candye Kane and Clock Hands Strangle

  Cincinnati CityBeat - Found Jun. 23, 2009 ... the gamut from the Shawn Colvin Folk shimmer of ?He?s Making a Fool Out of You? to the Mary Chapin Carpenter Country Pop chug of ?Let...

• Singer Lucinda Williams saw others find success with her songs

  NewsOK.com - Found Jun. 18, 2009 In 1993, Mary Chapin Carpenter scored gold with Williams? 'Passionate Kisses? from the same album, earning its writer a best country song...

• KATE WOLF?S CATALOG OF FOLK ALBUMS FROM KALEIDOSCOPE RECORDS TO BE ...

  PR inside - Found Jun. 2, 2009 Her blend of folk, country and pop helped pave the way for artists like Nanci Griffith and Mary-Chapin Carpenter.

• Washington Humane Society 22nd Annual Bark Ball

  Examiner.com - Found May. 31, 2009 Past guests have included Willard Scott, Chris Barkley, and Mary Chapin Carpenter as well as canine celebrities, Socks Clinton, Millie Bush...

• How to help ease someone's pain

  Cape Cod Online - Found May. 17, 2009 Bob Dylan says 'the world has gone black before my eyes.' Mary Chapin Carpenter sings of being 'wounded' in your soul.

• Family and friends become a support system in dark times, but not ...

  Cape Cod Online - Found May. 17, 2009 Bob Dylan says 'the world has gone black before my eyes.' Mary Chapin Carpenter sings of being 'wounded' in your soul.

• Folk singer to perform in Woodstock tonight

  Rutland Herald - Found May. 16, 2009 B.B. King, Emmylou Harris, Rod Stewart, Willie Nelson, The Allman Brothers, The Judds, James Taylor, Roger Miller and Mary Chapin Carpenter.

Mary Chapin Carpenter extracted from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia, distributed under the GNU Free Documentation License

Mary Chapin Carpenter
Carpenter in 1999.
Background information
Also known as	Mary-Chapin Carpenter
Born	February 21, 1958 (1958-02-21) (age 51)
Origin	Princeton, New Jersey, USA
Genre(s)	Country
Occupation(s)	Singer-songwriter
Instrument(s)	Vocals, Acoustic guitar, Electric guitar
Years active	1987-present
Label(s)	Columbia, Zoe
Associated acts	Terri Clark Shawn Colvin Joe Diffie
Website	www.marychapincarpenter.com

Mary Chapin Carpenter (born February 21, 1958) is an American folk and country music artist. Carpenter spent several years singing in Washington, D.C. clubs before signing in the late 1980s with Columbia Records, who marketed her as a country singer. Carpenter's first album, 1987's Hometown Girl, did not produce any singles, although 1989's State of the Heart and 1990's Shooting Straight in the Dark each produced four Top 20 hits on the Billboard country singles charts.

Carpenter's most successful album to date remains 1992's Come On Come On, which yielded seven charting country singles and was certified quadruple platinum in the U.S. for sales exceeding four million copies. She followed it with Stones in the Road (1994) and A Place in the World (1996), which both featured hit singles. In the 2000s, Carpenter's albums departed both thematically and musically from her early work, becoming less radio-friendly and more focused on societal and political issues. Her most recent, and most topical album to date, The Calling, was released in March 2007.

Carpenter has won five Grammy Awards, and is the only artist to have won four consecutive Grammy Award for Best Female Country Vocal Performance, which she received from 1992 to 1995.¹ As of 2005, she had sold more than 12 million records.²

Carpenter has performed on television shows such as Late Night with David Letterman and Austin City Limits and tours frequently, returning to Washington almost every summer to perform at the popular outdoor venue Wolf Trap.

Contents 1 Biography 1.1 Early life 1.2 Early records and "country" label 1.3 Continued 90s success 1.4 2000s work 1.5 Personal life 2 Awards 3 Discography 4 References 5 External links

Biography

Early life

Carpenter was born in Princeton, New Jersey to Chapin Carpenter Jr., a Life Magazine executive, and Mary Bowie Robertson. Carpenter lived in Japan from 1969 to 1971 before moving to Washington, D.C.³ She attended Princeton Day School, a private coeducational prep school⁴, before graduating from The Taft School in 1976.⁵

Carpenter described her childhood as "pretty typical[ly] suburban," with her musical interests defined chiefly by her sisters' albums of artists such as The Mamas & the Papas, the Beatles, and Judy Collins.⁶ When Carpenter was 16 her parents divorced, an event that affected Carpenter and that she wrote about in her song "House of Cards."³ Carpenter spent much of her time in high school playing the guitar and piano; while at Princeton Day School, her "classmates threatened to cut her guitar strings if she played "Leaving on a Jet Plane" one more time."⁷ Despite her interest in music, Carpenter never considered performing publicly until, shortly after graduating from Taft, her father suggested that she perform at a local open-mike bar, a stressful experience for the shy Carpenter, who recalled, "I thought I was going to barf."⁸

Carpenter graduated from Brown University in 1981 with a degree in American Civilization. Carpenter played some summer sets in Washington's music scene, where she met guitarist John Jennings, who would become her producer and long-time collaborator. However, she considered music a hobby and planned on getting a "real job."⁶ At those gigs, most played in bars, Carpenter developed what she called an "awful" drinking problem, and later recalled, "I had to make a lifestyle change in a drastic way. It's still so painful to me to think about how I was."⁶ She briefly quit performing, but after several job interviews decided to return to music. Carpenter quit drinking and was persuaded by Jennings to play original material instead of covers.⁸ Within a few years, she landed a manager and recorded a demo tape that led to a deal with Columbia Records.⁶

Early records and "country" label

Carpenter's first album, Hometown Girl, was produced by John Jennings and was released in 1987. Though songs from Hometown Girl got play on public and college radio stations, it was not until Columbia began promoting Carpenter as a "country" artist that she found a wider audience.⁹ For a long time, Carpenter was ambivalent about this pigeonholing, saying she preferred the term "singer-songwriter" or "slash rocker" (as in country/folk/rock). She told Rolling Stone in 1991, "I've never approached music from a categorization process, so to be a casualty of it is real disconcerting to me."⁶

Some music critics argue that Carpenter's style covers a range of influences even broader than those from "country" and "folk." Time critic Richard Corliss described the songs in her album A Place in the World as "reminiscent of early Beatles or rollicking Motown,"¹⁰ and one reviewer of Time* Sex* Love* noted the "wash of Beach Boys-style harmonies[...]backwards guitar loops" and use of a sitar on one track,¹¹ all elements not commonly found on a country or folk album.

After 1989's State of the Heart, Carpenter released Shooting Straight in the Dark in 1990, which yielded her biggest single up to that point, the Grammy Award-winning "Down at the Twist and Shout". Two years later, Carpenter released the album that, to date, has been her biggest popular success, Come On Come On (1992). The album went quadruple platinum, remaining on the Country Top 100 list for more than 97 weeks,¹ and eventually spawned seven charting singles. Come On Come On was also critically acclaimed; The New York Times's Karen Schoemer wrote that Carpenter had "risen through the country ranks without flash or bravado: no big hair, sequined gowns, teary performances[...]enriched with Ms. Carpenter's subtlety, Come On Come On grows stronger and prettier with every listen."¹²

The songs of Come On Come On had the qualities that would come to identify her work: humorous, fast-paced country-rock songs with themes of perseverance, desire, and independence, alternating with slow, introspective ballads that speak to social or relational issues.¹³ "Passionate Kisses", a cover of fellow singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams's 1988 song, was the album's third single. Carpenter's version peaked on the U.S. Country chart at #4, and was the first of Carpenter's songs to cross over to mainstream pop and adult contemporary charts, charting at #57 on the Billboard Hot 100 and at #11 on Adult Contemporary.¹⁴

The sixth single off Come On Come On, "He Thinks He'll Keep Her," was Carpenter's biggest hit off the album, charting at #2 on Billboard's Country chart and at #1 on Radio & Records's Country chart.¹⁴ Written by Carpenter and Don Schlitz, the fast-paced song follows a middle-aged homemaker who leaves her husband, and was inspired by a 1970s series of Geritol commercials in which a man boasts of his wife's seemingly limitless energy and her many accomplishments, then concludes by saying "My wife...I think I'll keep her." Carpenter said, "That line has always stuck with me. It's just such a joke."¹⁵

Continued 90s success

In the wake of Come On Come On's success, Carpenter wrote songs for a variety of artists, including Joan Baez, who recorded "Stones in the Road" for her 1992 album Play Me Backwards after hearing Carpenter sing it live. Pop singer Cyndi Lauper co-wrote "Sally's Pigeons" with Carpenter and released it on her 1993 album Hat Full of Stars. Country singer Wynonna Judd recorded Carpenter's composition "Girls With Guitars" on her 1993 album Tell Me Why. Judd released the song as a single in 1994, in what Carpenter called "the most exciting thing that's ever happened to me as a songwriter,"¹ and it peaked on the U.S. Country chart at #10.¹⁶ Later, Carpenter co-wrote "Where Are You Now," which Trisha Yearwood recorded on her 2000 album Real Live Woman; the song peaked on the Country chart at #45. In the 1990s, Carpenter also dueted with Shawn Colvin, a "longtime recording pal", and sang backup in Radney Foster's "Nobody Wins"¹⁷ Dolly Parton (on Parton's 1993 single "Romeo") and Joan Baez (on a 1995 live recording of "Diamonds & Rust.") Carpenter also performed a number of concerts with Baez and the Indigo Girls as The Four Voices, during the mid- to late-1990s.

Carpenter followed Come On Come On with 1994's Stones in the Road, at which point USA Today wrote that "without sounding anything like a country star was previously expected to sound, [Carpenter]'s one of the genre's biggest stars."³ Stones in the Road sold only around two million copies, but was a crossover success with non-country audiences.¹⁷ Carpenter's sixth album, A Place in the World, was released in 1996 to "raves" from publications as varied as Time, People, Elle, the New York Post, and USA Today.¹⁷ The Boston Globe found the album more "philosophical [and] heady" than her previous work, and quoted Carpenter as saying, "[A]ll I've wanted to get out of songwriting is a sense of growth[...]I'm not shying away from any issues or subjects. I don't feel there's anything I can't address."¹⁷

In 1996, Carpenter's cover of the John Lennon song "Grow Old With Me," from the Lennon tribute album Working Class Hero, became an Adult Contemporary chart hit. The song 10,000 Miles was the signature track in the 1996 family film Fly Away Home. In 1998, Carpenter was signed to write the music and lyrics for a planned Broadway musical adaptation of the 1953 western film Shane; the show was announced to open in spring 2000,¹⁸ but as of November 2007 remains unproduced.

2000s work

In 2001, Carpenter released her first studio album in five years, Time*Sex*Love. The New York Times wrote that Carpenter was "harder than ever to define stylistically," and described the album as a departure, "essentially a concept album about middle age."¹⁹ In songs such as "The Long Way Home," Carpenter espoused taking life at one's own pace, rather than indulging in rampant goal-driven materialism.

Time*Sex*Love sold fewer copies than Carpenter's earlier work,¹⁹ and yielded only one charting single, "Simple Life," which peaked on the U.S. Country chart at #53.¹⁴ Carpenter explained that, "When the record was released, I really believed there were several radio-friendly songs[...]it has been since proven to me that is not exactly the case." ¹¹

In 2004, Carpenter released Between Here and Gone, a somber album that addressed events such as the events of September 11 and the death of singer-songwriter Dave Carter.²²⁰ The album received some of the best reviews of Carpenter's career.

Carpenter's ninth studio album, The Calling, was released in 2007 by Rounder Records' rock/pop imprint Zoë, and featured commentary about contemporary politics, including reactions to the impact of Hurricane Katrina ("Houston") and the agreement with the Dixie Chicks ("On With the Song"). In less than three months after its release, The Calling sold more than 100,000 copies in the US, without benefit of any substantial airplay on commercial country radio. This was followed by a Christmas album, Come Darkness, Come Light, which mixed original and traditional material, also on the Zoë label.²¹

Carpenter is also at work on her next studio recording possibly for 2009

Personal life

Despite a series of relationships, including one with John Jennings, the media made much of Carpenter's single status throughout the nineties; in a 1994 profile, Entertainment Weekly even dubbed her "a spokes-singer for the thirtysomething single woman."²² In 2002, Carpenter married Tim Smith, a general contractor. They currently live at "Elysium," a farm near Charlottesville, Virginia. Throughout her career, she has actively supported various charities, including CARE and Habitat for Humanity, and has conducted fundraising concerts for such causes as the elimination of landmines.

Carpenter has struggled with periods of depression since childhood.²³ While on tour with her album The Calling in spring 2007, Carpenter experienced severe chest and back pain. She continued to perform until a bout of breathlessness took her to the ER, where she learned she had suffered a pulmonary embolism. Cancelling her summer tour to recover, Carpenter "felt that [she] had let everyone down" and fell into a depression before rediscovering "the learning curve of gratitude."²⁴ Carpenter spoke about the experience on National Public Radio's This I Believe program in June 2007.

Mary Chapin Carpenter has been the author of a biweekly column in the Washington Times since December 2008 discuss a variety of topics related to music and politic.

Awards

• Grammy Awards
  • 1992: Grammy Award for Best Female Country Vocal Performance winner - "Down at the Twist and Shout"
  • 1993: Grammy Award for Best Female Country Vocal Performance winner - "I Feel Lucky"
  • 1994: Grammy Award for Best Female Country Vocal Performance winner - "Passionate Kisses"
  • 1994: Grammy Award for Best Country Album winner - Stones In the Road
  • 1995: Grammy Award for Best Female Country Vocal Performance winner - "Shut Up and Kiss Me"

• Country Music Association Awards
  • 1992 and 1993: Female Vocalist of the Year

• Academy of Country Music Awards
  • 1989: Top New Female Vocalist
  • 1992: Top Female Vocalist

Discography

References

External links

• Mary Chapin Carpenter at the Internet Movie Database
• Mary Chapin Carpenter official web site
• Comprehensive Mary Chapin Carpenter Discography

v • d • e Mary Chapin Carpenter Studio albums Hometown Girl · State of the Heart · Shooting Straight in the Dark · Come On Come On · Stones in the Road · A Place in the World · Time* Sex* Love* · Between Here and Gone · The Calling Compilation albums Party Doll and Other Favorites · The Essential Mary Chapin Carpenter · Super Hits · Playlist: The Best of Mary Chapin Carpenter Specialty albums Come Darkness, Come Light Top 20 singles "How Do" · "Never Had It So Good" · "Quittin' Time" · "Something of a Dreamer" · "You Win Again" · "Right Now" · "Down at the Twist and Shout" · "Going Out Tonight" · "I Feel Lucky" · "Not Too Much to Ask" · "Passionate Kisses" · "The Hard Way" · "The Bug" · "He Thinks He'll Keep Her" · "I Take My Chances" · "Shut Up and Kiss Me" · "Tender When I Want to Be" · "Let Me Into Your Heart" Related articles Discography