Thankfully, she has recovered fully, and there is a sense of renewal, reflection and resilience permeating this impressive comeback album, a disc which finds Carpenter frequently contemplating the miracles all around us.
The songwriter is headed back out on the road as well, and will be playing material from the new album as well as many of her classics as she barnstorms across the U.S. this summer – including an appearance at the Calvin Theatre in Northampton on Friday.
Always a fascinating interview subject, she’s as articulate and thoughtful to speak with as the woman who has repeatedly touched hearts and minds with the lyrical eloquence found on her recordings. From her home in central Virginia recently, she spoke of the new album, bouncing back from her illness, the state of radio and even offered a fascinating perspective on Ernest Hemingway’s first wife:
The last time we spoke was in February 2007, just when you were about to release “The Calling.” Things got pretty scary in your life just shortly after that.
Yeah. In April, it was pretty awful. My doctors told me I was very fortunate very lucky, those things are highly unpredictable and they can take your life in an instant. I had some wonderful doctors and now we’re celebrating being able to go back to work.
When did you start picking up your writing process again?
I think it was about six months or so after I got out of the hospital. Writing at that point was really just an act of faith. I really didn’t know when I was going to get back to work or what incarnation or whatever. I was just writing to write. I wasn’t thinking oh I’m going to eventually put out a new record. That’s what I do and that’s what I did and that’s what I’ve always done to help me. It’s partly exploring things, partly soothing myself with music, partly deconstructing a lot of the feelings I had and wanting to process it through music. I think it’s pretty natural when you think about it for a songwriter. It was only about three years later that I felt that I had the songs that would make up an entire album and invariably it was something of a narrative of the experience I had gone through.
You’ve always been considered a strong lyricist but your lyric writing seems more fine-tuned than ever on “The Age of Miracles.” At one point in the title track you relate personal fear to the vision of monks, dressed in red robes and bare feet pouring into the streets. How did you come up with the concept of that connection?
That song is really very much of a straight narrative of what I had been through. The first verse is all about the feeling of terror and retreat and literally hiding away and forgetting how to feel connected to the world, and dreams and all those things that the illness had imposed on me.
And then the second verse is looking out into the world and seeing all these things, our inability to control the extraordinary power of nature, everything from Katrina to the 40th Anniversary of the Apollo moon mission and asking these questions: If we do live in an age of miracles – this hyperbole is thrown about all the time, whether it’s about technology, our ability to map the human genome or whatever – if we do live in an age of miracles, is one on the way? It asks the question. And if one is on the way, what does it consist of? Is it going to be world peace, is it going to cure cancer, is it going to lift our burdens off of us?
And the last verse, during that extraordinary week, about three years ago when the monks were marching in Burma for a week in support of their countrymen against this totalitarian regime, in the rain, in their bare feet. To me, the world was holding its breath every day seeing what kind of pushback there would be. What kind of punishment was going to happen? I just felt like the courage, the bravery, the absolute certainty that these people had about what they were doing, it was enough to shake me out of my stupor. It was enough to make me feel like there’s so much to be awed by in this world, so much to be inspired by, so much to take comfort from, so much to value. And I wanted to not be hiding and I didn’t want to retreat anymore and I wanted to be able to see that my problems were nothing compared to what I was seeing out in the world and it was absolutely necessary to get up and feel connected again.
Gradually over the past 15 years, but especially on your two most recent albums, you really seem to have stepped far away from the bigger country pop sound that was filled with hooks, in favor of more introspective material. Do you feel that’s a correct assumption, and if so, did you worry about losing the fans who loved you for “Down at the Twist and Shout” “Shut Up and Kiss Me” and those early songs?
Well, that’s a complicated question in the sense that I never felt like I had stopped writing songs that I would consider radio songs, that I could imagine hearing on the radio in terms of perhaps being larger more muscular songs, that kind of thing. For example “The Way I Feel” and “I Put My Ring Back On,” could go side-by-side with anything that I ever did back then. Again, I think so much is perception. At the same time you don’t want to write the same songs over and over again. Those songs came about the way they did, it was very organic, there was no calculation in any way, I loved writing and recording them, singing them, and I can’t wait to sing them this summer.
But radio, the industry, that’s a whole more complicated thing and that doesn’t stand still and that moves on. You may be doing the same thing you’ve always been doing but that doesn’t mean the radio world is able to see it as the same thing.
If anything I have nothing but enormous affection and gratitude that I had this time in my life when I was getting played on the radio and it was tremendously exciting and thrilling and it brought me the opportunity to play for so many people. How can you not be so grateful for that opportunity? I was. I was able to build a career on it. And now it just feels like it’s an extraordinary thing to be able to say “Hey it’s time to tour, let’s go out there and see the folks.”
Tell me about the freedom of being alone on a midnight highway with the radio playing “I Won’t Back Down” that you write about in “The Way I Feel.”
I presume that most people have had that same experience. I think it’s like a right of passage. Once you’re old enough to drive that you find yourself on a dark highway somewhere. You’re not necessarily fleeing something and you’re not necessarily racing toward something but you just want to be alone. And you just want to be in the dark and you just want to see the glow of the radio. And you just want to sing at the top of your lungs. And there’s something liberating and freeing, it’s a version of being alive that feels pretty universal.
In some of the press materials for the album you describe yourself as writing reports from the “strange and mysterious territory known as Love and Marriage.” It doesn’t take a long stretch to think that “I Put My Ring Back on” was one of those reports. Tell me about the song.
I presume and hope and pray that I’m not the only person who’s ever pulled off their ring and thrown it. It’s a song about real life, very simply it’s not very mysterious in that way.
How did you come up with the idea about writing about Mrs. Hemingway?
I re-read (Ernest Hemingway’s) “A Moveable Feast” last summer when it came out in a new edition. I was reminded once again, as I was when I first read it in college, of what a shadowy mysterious and interesting figure Hadley Richardson Hemingway was. His first wife, she was just so fascinating and that life they led in Paris in the early ‘20s when they were starving artists and meeting so many incredible people and having these extraordinary experiences. A lot of people look at that and say “what a charmed existence.” And it was for a time. But the story of course is that he falls in love with her best friend. It’s the ultimate betrayal. He looks back in “A Moveable Feast” as if he’s almost saying that was the mark at which … he lost his grace. Fame and wine and women and corruption went along with that. He was never the same after that as a writer, as a person. “A Moveable Feast” is a complicated look back at that time but it’s one with affection as well and so much of it is directed toward Hadley.
I just was fascinated. I had the time last summer to look up on the Internet to find a bunch of out of print books about her. I spent about a month just inhaling every detail I could find out about her. I just wanted to write about that time…She was such an extraordinary person. And I think what people don’t know is that she ended up – even though it was the ultimate betrayal of course, it was just devastating – she ended up having a very happy marriage with a diplomat and she had a lovely life. She always thought about Ernest Hemingway with much love and compassion and empathy for all of his challenges and trouble. The fact that she was not embittered that way, she really could look back at those photographs and smile. I just loved writing about her.
You went to Rounder Records a few years ago after a long career at Columbia. Now Rounder is being sold to Concord. Did that disappoint you and does the timing affect the album?
I actually think it’s great. For me, when I left Columbia it was between going to Concord or Rounder. So I felt I was really excited to hear that they decided to join forces. They’re putting out so many interesting pieces of music and so many different kinds of artists are gravitating towards it, it really is a new model. I think it’s a very exciting time.
What does it feel like to be heading out on tour again?
It feels celebratory. I’m just really excited about it. It feels like summer again. This is what I’m used to doing in the summer as opposed to staying home and wondering.
Musically, who do you find that still inspires you?
Oh there’s lot of things. One of my new favorite records is Josh Ritter’s new record. I think he’s just ridiculously brilliant. I just love him. There’s this group called HEM that I’ve always loved, I can’t wait for them to put out a new record. Just everything they do is mystical and evocative. I’ve been listening to a lot of opera lately…just a lot of stuff I’m not the most eclectic collector of music but at the same time I like to listen to a lot of different things. There was one record that somebody gave me, it’s called The Civil Wars. That’s the name of the duo from Nashville, they’ve got this EP called “Poison and Wine.” It just send shivers up my spine, it’s fabulous. And Tift Merritt’s new record, I love that. I find myself always going back to the people I love and I listen to classical and a lot of talk radio.
Talk radio … you don’t really seem like the Rush Limbaugh type.
No, when I said talk radio I am a cliché. I meant NPR talk radio. I think I would crash the car (listening to other formats of talk radio).
You said in our last interview that if you had not gone into music you might have liked to have been a veterinarian. Do you still have all the animals? Do they go on tour with you?
They’re going to stay home. There are too many of them. There are six dogs now, five cats and two horses. They’re all going to be part of their pack at home. I still would have liked to have been a vet but I’m just not good in math and science.
Looking back, at what point in your career did it really hit you that your popularity had gone through the roof? Was there any downside at all to that level of stardom?
I don’t know if I can pinpoint a time. When it’s happening to you at the time I don’t think you’re thinking about it, you’re just trying to do your job. It’s more like this is something to be grateful for and do the best job possible. I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about what it meant in the larger sense except to be appreciative of it.
How long will the new tour last, how far will you travel and what do you want to do next?
The typical cycle life of an album is about 18 months. We’ll do the summer tour and we will do dates in the fall and I hope to get overseas in the fall and then it’s just a matter of putting together some interesting incarnations of travel music. As far as what to do next I really haven’t thought about it. I’m just kind of immersing myself and it’s hard to do a whole lot when you’re touring so I’m just taking one task at a time and that feels good to me.