Mary Chapin Carpenter returns with The Dirt and the Stars, her first album of all-new material since 2016’s brilliant The Things That We Are Made Of. Just as with 2018’s Sometimes Just the Sky, mostly new versions of previously recorded songs, she again has Ethan Johns producing, this time recording entirely live at Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios in Bath, in southwest England. Subject matter is much like 2016, a bit existential as Carpenter ponders personal moments and raises a series of rhetorical questions via song. The songs were written at her rural, secluded Virginia farmhouse before the onset of the health pandemic.
Carpenter talks about the theme of the album as we are all constantly “becoming” through art and expression, a thought she was impacted by from the writer Margaret Renkl of The New York Times. In the process of such explanation, Carpenter rattles off a litany of subjects – life changes, growing older, politics, compassion, #metoo, heartbreak, empathy, the power of memory, time, and place. Carpenter takes long solo walks around her property to aid in the songwriting process, the fruits of which are evident in the opening “Farther Along and Further In,” about recognizing that something has changed gradually but distinctly. Perhaps with age comes respecting the spiritual over the practical. Empathy becomes the theme of the explicitly stated “It’s Ok To Be Sad” and the standout “All Broken Hearts Break Differently,” which evokes Band-like chord patterns and great dissolving organ-like runs played by Nick Pini on Moog.
We should also mention that the vinyl version has two bonus tracks – “Old Man Walter Cronkite” and “Traveler’s Prayer.” The musical backing is akin to what you associate with Carpenter, soft folk-rock filled with lush keyboards and layered guitars. The crew aboard, all recording live, are multi-instrumentalist Johns who plays a variety of stringed instruments and percussion, superb piano/keyboards from Matt Rollings and the usual stellar electric guitar from long-time collaborator Duke Levine. Jeremy Stacey mans the drum kit.
”Old D-45” is a softly sung ode to her Martin guitar while the engaging, scathing Rollings’ organ-driven shuffle “American Stooge” takes on politics, specifically Lindsey Graham, who once criticized Trump in the early days of Trump’s initial Presidential campaign and quickly switched to be his lackey and mouthpiece. We all know this soulless character too well. We then move from condemnation to touching appreciation in “Where the Beauty Is.” The extensive “Nocturne” finds Carpenter painting a vivid portrait of an older man quietly ruminating about aging. This is the last verse – “We’re all trying to live up to some oath to ourselves/Try holding back time but it will not be held/No king has the power, no mortal the skill/But still you keep trying to see/What’s waiting for you at the end of your days/the wars you inherit, the truces you make/the riches you squandered, the love that you earned/and the nocturne you heard in a dream.
“Secret Keepers’ is a radio-friendly tune with riffs and guitar runs reminiscent of her big hit, “Passionate Kisses.” The piano rendered beautifully melancholic standout “Asking For A Friend” is sung in Carpenter’s signature soft-spoken, half whispering voice, dripping with intimacy. “Everybody’s Got Something” takes a similar tone but delivers a message empathy and healing with this chorus – “You’re not the first, you’re not the last/It could be worse, this will pass/I know you hurt, you hurt so bad/But a light comes shining to stitch and mend/One day you’ll find you’re you again/It takes some time
For a peek into Carpenter’s songwriting mindset, here she comments on the outstanding epic title track (“Between The Dirt And The Stars”) and her long-time guitarist, Duke Levine’s soaring solo. “I was 17 years old; it was the summer that I had graduated from high school. It was one of those moments you remember, being with your friends, with a gauzy nostalgia, because you’re young, without responsibility, without any sense of limits. The sense that everything unknown is ahead of you brings feelings of being both liberated and lost…It was 1 in the morning and The Rolling Stones’ “Wild Horses” was on the car radio. I remember leaning my head back, closing my eyes. It may have lasted only 30 seconds, but the lyrics had a through line to my heart and I felt suspended in time. I was imagining it was the happiest I had ever felt and the saddest at the same time. Isn’t that duality at the heart of every mystery we experience as human beings? It was just one of those moments I wish I could put it in amber, hold it forever. That [guitar solo] is just like the part of the movie with the car going down the road on this luminous, humid night. Fast-forward to where I am now. I’m still in one piece, and I still believe that most people are good. I still believe in the innocence of first love, perfect songs and a sweet buzz from a can of cheap beer. Everything I’ve ever felt, every place I’ll ever dream of finding as well as every place I’ve ever been, can be found in a trance-like memory of riding in a car on a hot summer night listening to the radio. To quote another song, that’s where the beauty is…
Need we say more? Mary Chapin Carpenter’s songs speak to all of us.
