Interview with Mary Chapin Carpenter October 1999
It says something about Mary Chapin Carpenter’s integrity and professionalism that she paid as much attention to compiling Party Doll and Other Favourites, a 17-track hits-and-out-takes CD, as she did to any of her other six original studio albums.
“ I enjoyed putting it together because it was something of a treasure hunt for me: not in a self –aggrandising sense, but in looking for songs I had forgotten about that I wanted to find, ” she explains.
Carpenter’s retrospective takes in special projects that she worked on and that she feels particularly reveal her creative strengths: “ I didn’t want it to be interpreted as the ultimate, definitive collection of my years in music – I wouldn’t have included less hits in that regard, because songs that end up on the radio can’t possibly reflect entirely who you are as an artist. ”
A live number recorded on the David Letterman Show opens the album, and along the way we hear Mary Chapin at the Superbowl with cajun band Beausoleil; in acoustic concert at the Ryman, Nashville and singing a traditional song for a movie soundtrack. “ I wanted variety, ” she says. “ Some may feel it’s a bit of a jumble, but I rather like its breadth. ”
Among the more unusual tracks is her version of John Lennon’s Grow Old With Me, the original song given a much softer tone. As a songwriter and person who is herself involved in many social issues does she see any parallel with Lennon’s background and attitude? ” I don’t think so. I am a writer more than anything else. As far as having a global perspective or social conscience, I don’t feel that that evolved in me. It’s just part of my moral code. ”
Often misunderstood by journalists and critics intent on locating Carpenter’s “ real ” persona, she is taken aback by deep-profile meandering. One country magazine writer painted her as dark and insecure. Another said that she articulated “ the disappointments and desires of liberal America ”. Comment? “ Oh, my…That’s a big statement. It gives me a lot of responsibility. I wonder what I would have needed to sound like to articulate the disappointments, etc of conservative America. ”
The CD and the confident publicity tone of the upcoming tour point to a high in her career. What does she feel? “ It’s always great when you have a new record out – something to be excited about and proud of. Careers nowadays last…two seconds maybe? ”
This winter’s concerts in Northern Ireland are Mary Chapin’s first here. With close friends in both Belfast and Derry, she already has a fan-base. She’s had Donegal roots band Altan support her on a US tour. And with distant relatives down in County Cork, she won’t feel homesick.
The Man From God Knows Where, Tom Russell’s song-cycle album, was eight years in the developing, and he recalls its specific genesis: “ I was working in a studio. I hit a series of chords on the piano that worked themselves into a chorus beginning with the words ‘ American Primitive Man ’.
Russell thought this could lead into a musical about American history, but, changing tack, he progressed imaginatively on to a different plane, using factual background about the early frontier settlers for the drama’s basis: “ The more I found out about the historical setting the more the work centred on the ancestors, the pioneers themselves. ”
Using an ostensibly unconnected network of sources to build up the album’s main concept – how the New World emigrants stuggled and lived from day to day – Russell was able to key back into his own family past. He listened to traditional music from Irish and Norwegian archival records for influences and motifs.
The song cycle unfolds on two levels. Five singers/narrators, including Iris DeMent and Dolores Keane, articulate the American and European emigrants’ experiences. Russell incorporates very personal incidents and impressions from his immediate and older family past. The end product is as much a testimony to Russell’s persistent vision and faith as to his artistic abilities: organising such a disparate group of singers and finding a patient, sympathetic recording company wasn’t easy.
Painful poignant images of both European and American immigrants pervade The Man From God Knows Where. Yet Russell tempers the anecdotes about hardship with humour and wryness. Dave Van Ronk acts as a cynical commentator-linkman who highlights the other side of the promised land: inbred second cousins and homosexual uncles. And one of the liner pictures shows the real Sitting Bull and Bill Cody in a gondola in Venice during a European tour. The song about this is a neat reversal of the emigrants’ accounts elsewhere on the album.
Finding a time when all the singers involved would be free to participate in a live roadshow would be logistically difficult, Russell realises, but he tried. “ We almost did it at a jazz festival in Norway – we had all the singers, except Iris DeMent. It wasn’t easy, but we got good reviews. The bottom line, however, is that I have to go out on the road as a one-man show and ‘ do ’ the record. That’s what I’ve been doing for the past 20 years with all my projects. ”