Mary Chapin Carpenter’s The Calling, her first release for Zöe/Rounder, is unique among a body of work that has earned her five Grammy Awards and helped her sell 13 million records in the first 20 years of her career. While her writing continues to be deeply personal, this new collection of songs also 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. Thematically, the album is about faith, vocation, commitment, responsibility, and the ways these are wielded for various—often, competing—agendas.
Carpenter’s approach ranges from intimate to anthemic, and on some of this material—like the title track and the spare, stirring “Here I Am,” for example—she combines the two, contemplating the sort of big-picture questions that become more important as we grow older. Carpenter is more interested in the act of asking than in providing answers, though; she suggests an approach to life where mystery and possibility can tantalizingly co-exist.
The Calling is Carpenter’s second co-production with pianist Matt Rollings. The pair had initially worked together on Carpenter’s 2004 disc, Between Here and Gone, which also marked the first time Carpenter actually recorded in a Nashville studio, despite such country chart staples as “I Feel Lucky,” “Shut Up and Kiss Me” and “Down at the Twist and Shout.” (When “He Thinks He’ll Keep Her” was nominated in 1995 for Record of the Year, it was the second time in Grammy history that a nomination in this category had gone to a country artist.)
On The Calling, as in previous recordings, Carpenter confidently crosses boundaries of genre, incorporating elements of folk and rock as well as country into the mix. The Central Virginia-based Carpenter returned to Nashville last year to record The Calling and assembled many of the same players from the Between Here and Gone sessions, along with veteran engineer Chuck Ainlay, the long-standing right-hand man to Mark Knopfler and Dire Straits.
“I wanted to work with Matt Rollings and Chuck Ainley again.” Carpenter says. “It was enormously inspiring to be among all the players; I got to work with [legendary session percussionist] Russ Kunkel for the first time. Every drum hit was like the voice of God to me. To be in his presence was just extraordinary. There was a wonderful atmosphere in the studio in terms of everybody throwing in their own opinions. That’s the key component: Everyone feels like they have a voice, and that gives me a lot of confidence.”
Carpenter admits that songwriting “takes a long period of time for me. It’s never a short, easy process,” but this time, “I had a lot more songs than I can ever recall marching into the studio with, about 20 or 21.” With Rollings’ help, she pared the lineup down to 13 tracks. The title song, about the ineffable forces that propel us forward, was among the first to arrive: “For my ritual of writing, I tend to be sitting at my desk. I have a yellow legal pad and a pencil and a mini-disc player, and sometimes I just wait. This song—I don’t remember having the idea before I began to write, it’s one of those songs that just came about, I guess. By the time I got through the first stanza, I knew where I was going and what I wanted to say.” Carpenter often notated the day she completed these songs; she finished “The Calling” on September 12, 2004.
Shortly before that, with the presidential election looming, Carpenter wrote “Why Shouldn’t We.” Though very much a product of the moment, it resonates even more deeply now. (“We believe in things we’re told that we cannot change/Why shouldn’t we/We had heroes once, and we will again/Why shouldn’t we.”) As Carpenter explains, “We were going out on tour and I was thinking about my set list. I wanted to start the show every night with a feeling of optimism and hope. I was thinking I should find an existing song that speaks to me in that way. There was so much going on to divide people, and I wanted to counter that somehow. I ended up writing ‘Why Shouldn’t We’ and that sort of became my anthem.”
Carpenter is incendiary on the track “On With the Song,” which was inspired by the backlash to the Dixie Chicks. “Houston,” about Katrina refugees, has the quiet power of Woody Guthrie’s “Deportee.” Carpenter employs a lilting New Orleans slow-dance rhythm to underscore in counterpoint fashion the tragic story she tells. As Carpenter recalls, “In the weeks that followed the hurricane, when people were being bussed everywhere, you would hear snippets on the radio about people being relocated. The saddest, most heartbreaking element of it was people saying, I can never go back home, there is nothing there for me. We in our cozy little houses with everything fine—we just couldn’t imagine what that was like.”
Other songs came from a place close to Carpenter’s own heart. “It Must Have Happened,” Carpenter says, “contains a number of references to things that are tender and important to me. For example, the line ‘I can’t remember rowing towards the moon on a single beam…’ I remember being very young and my family was camping out in a little house on Lake Champlain. It was raining all the time but I remember one night when the moon was rising, and when you see moon on the water there’s this beam that just goes on forever. You think you could put your boat on it, you could follow it to the moon. I remember my dad and mom got on a boat and started rowing. I remember watching them go farther and farther and farther away and wishing I could be on that boat too.”
Carpenter ends The Calling on a hopeful note: “‘Bright Morning Star’ is a song I wrote after going through a really bad time, professionally and personally. One evening, after too much waking up in the middle of the night, tossing and turning, I had a dream and it felt as if I’d already woken up. In the dream, I got out of bed, I walked downstairs, walked outside in my bare feet, walked up our hill and looked at the stars. I had this very clear feeling of seeing these stars and feeling how small you are on the earth and how it doesn’t matter, that everything was going to be all right. It was like this little dream that came to me in the night and the next day I wrote that song. I had comforted myself somehow, or something in my psyche managed to get through and find me and give me that little dream. It had the effect of soothing me in such a way that I stopped waking up in the middle of the night, and things did change. So this is a song about feeling completely alone and confused and then, in the end, believing in yourself again and in the world. It’s a song of peacefulness and it was important to me that it end the record.”
The Calling is a little like Mary Chapin Carpenter’s dream. She soothes us as well as herself and reminds us of all the remarkable possibilities that lie ahead, as long as we keep looking for them.
—Michael Hill