Mary Chapin Carpenter - The Calling
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Music CD Cover
Artist: Mary Chapin CarpenterEdition: Music CD
Audio: English (Original Language)
CD Release Date: 2007-03-06
Music Label: Zoe Records
Soundtracks:
- The Calling
- We're All Right
- Twilight
- It Must Have Happened
- On And On It Goes
- Your Life Story
- Houston
- Leaving Song
- On With The Song
- Closer And Closer Apart
- Here I Am
- Why Shouldn't We
- Bright Morning Star
Free Music Notes for The Calling
Free Music Review: Mary Chapin's True Calling
Hit: 5 Stars
Like Paul Simon, Mary Chapin Carpenter is not a particularly prolific songwriter. She crafts her songs with care, honing and perfecting them before she shares them with the listening public. But like Simon in his prime, when she does decide the songs are ready and releases an album of new material, the result is usually outstanding.
With The Calling, MCC leaves the major label world where she stood out for her literacy and honesty, and enters the land of the independents, recording for Zoe Records, an imprint of the folk-oriented Rounder family of labels. That being the case, one might expect an all-acoustic outing along the lines of her first record, 1987's Hometown Girl.
Surprise! While the opening title track begins with a Springsteen "Thunder Road" piano opening, it develops into an electric guitar driven modern country ballad. Except that the lyrics are much more intelligent than anything you're likely to hear on Eagle 97. When big-bam-boom drums kick off "We're All Right," you know Mary Chapin's been plugging in her Rickenbacker out in the rolling hills of central Virginia when the songwriting urge appears. This one is an ought-to-be hit single waiting for some open-eared radio programmer to risk expanding his playlist.
I'm guessing it won't be a country music one, though. "On with the Song," rockin' as hard as anything coming out of Nashville these days (atop a jangly Byrds/Tom Petty electric 12-string), stands her defiantly with the Dixie Chicks--"This isn't for the ones with their radio signal/Calling for bonfires and boycotts they rave"--and is her most blatantly political song to date: "This isn't for the man who can't count the bodies/Can't comfort the families, can't say when he's wrong/Claiming I'm the decider, like some sort of messiah/While another day passes and a hundred souls gone."
"It Must Have Happened" is an anthemic rocker built on a Stones-like lick that punches up personal, ultimately triumphal lyrics. She wrote "Why Shouldn't We" as an expression of hope on the eve of the 2004 elections. The album's centerpiece, "Houston," tells the tale of Hurricane Katrina refugees saying goodbye to New Orleans as they roll toward an uncertain future in Texas.
Carpenter's most touching songs are usually her intimate acoustic guitar pieces, either telling an imagined story of some semi-fictitious character or autobiographically revealing a snippet of her own life. There are several here: "Here I Am" is beautiful and touching; "Twilight" is the disc's prettiest song; "On and On It Goes" is sheer poetry. "Closer and Closer Apart," essentially a voice and piano duet, is heartbreaking in its evocation of a sad farewell.
It's interesting to note that Mary Chapin Carpenter never recorded in Nashville when she was topping the country charts in the early `90s. But now that she is in a musical class by herself, unfettered by anyone's hitmaking machinery and unbound by any constraints other than those imposed by her own muse, she has cut her second album in a row there. And she just gets better. She remains the class act of her generation. The Calling continues her remarkable string of masterful works.
copyright © 2007 Port Folio Weekly. Used by Permission.
Originally published in Port Folio Weekly, 3/27/07.
The Calling Poster
As a songwriter and performer, Mary Chapin Carpenter has long since transcended the traditional notions of genre and style, finding widespread acclaim for her poetic, elegantly - observed compositions. The Calling, her first release for Zoë/Rounder, is the most topical album she's made in her twenty-year career. While it unequivocally addresses issues both public and political - from the after-effects of Hurricane Katrina to religious zealotry to the trial-by-radio of the Dixie Chicks -- there is also something deeply personal about this extraordinary collection of songs. The album is a powerful, provocative meditation on the mysteries of fate and circumstance, which mingles timeless questions with contemporary issues. Introspective, defiant and deeply resonant, The Calling is a profound set from one of modern songwriting's most distinctive voices.Featuring "It Must Have Happened," "We're All Right," and "On with the Song."
In recent years, Mary Chapin Carpenter--once among the most promising stars of the folkie infiltration of Nashville ("Down at the Twist and Shout," "I Feel Lucky")--abandoned all desire to dot the country music charts. Free of that ill-fitting yoke she returned to being what she really was all along: A literate acoustic singer-songwriter. In 2004, she released a tour de force, Between Here and Gone, which combined affecting social commentary on the events of 9/11 with personal meditations on her changed life as a married woman living in rural Virginia. The Calling picks up where that album left off, using the same co-producer, pianist Matt Rollings, and core musicians, including John Jennings, who helped Carpenter shape her sonic landscape some 20 years ago. If the new album goes farther in advocating a political conscience--"On with the Song" takes jabs at the jingoistic rubes who dissed the Dixie Chicks, while "Why Shouldn't We" insists we'll have worthy heroes in office again one day--it largely invokes the same quiet, warm, and conversational tone as its predecessor. On the whisper-soft "Twilight," which frames a perfect, peaceful evening with a nearly spiritual grace, a listener might easily imagine himself chatting with the artist about long-held secrets and shared experiences, the Blue Ridge Mountains looming in the background. That is part of Carpenter?s gift--connecting with her audience's shadow self, using her deeply nuanced alto to fill even the simplest words with profound knowing. As a pure craftsman, however, she ranks with the giants of past generations in capturing the small, bruised hearts seemingly lost in the chaos of a catastrophic event. "Houston," one such song here, recalls Woody Guthrie's great "Deportee" in its power and the pathos of the Hurricane Katrina victims who were forced to evacuate their homes, leaving everything behind but fear and hope. "Mama's got her baby/Sleeping in a grocery cart," it begins, at once setting up a picture of wrenching desperation. Carpenter, no stranger to blue moods herself, knows how tough it is to emerge from a dark period of pained restlessness to find one's very self again. The album's soothing closer, "Bright Morning Star," like much of the record as a whole, offers a beacon of light and safe harbor for those shipwrecked on life's rocky shores. --Alanna Nash
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