Mary Chapin Carpenter

Event Details

Charleston Music Hall presents, Mary Chapin Carpenter!

Flatland is little aid to contemplation, and so Mary Chapin Carpenter has her own hill.

It’s deep in the Virginia countryside, on a farm that she got for a song. Or rather, for a bunch of songs, and a way of singing and playing them that has taken her around the world and back home, over and again.

Carpenter and those songs have traveled for thirty years, though the songs are the most frequent fliers. They spring from her head and hands, vibrate through tone woods and six steel strings, then find their way into microphones. Then they go forth into the world - they’ve been doing that for thirty years now—even at times when their creator sits at the top of her hill and observes natural wonders both human-made and mysterious.

Sometimes church bells, trees, and seasons marking times gone by. Sometimes starling swells and tidal moons and filled-up eyes. Sometimes everything at once, and sometimes just the sky.

That’s what thirty years brings: Sometimes everything at once, and sometimes just the sky. She knows that now, though knowing takes a long, long time. It’s still hard to know whether everything at once is preferable to just the sky. In halcyon, everything at once times — like when she won country music prizes as vocalist of the year and Grammy awards for all sorts of things — she was reminded to enjoy the moment. But up on the hill, the sky is its own reminder.

Anyway, it’s hard as hell to keep a job for thirty years. It’s cause for commemoration of some sort, and that sort might normally involve nostalgia and trophy-polishing. But nostalgia and trophy- polishing are flatland ideas, and Carpenter has her own hill. Sometimes Just the Sky is not a greatest hits endeavor or a remastered compilation. It’s not a celebration or a souvenir. It is a reimagining of a most unusual nature.

It is a collection of songs written across the decades, recorded in bucolic western England at Real World Studios with the great producer Ethan Johns. Carpenter sat with new and old friends who circled together in a wooden room and made music, in real time. What we hear is precisely what was played and sung, all at once.

There’s a song originally recorded for each of Carpenter’s original studio albums, and then there’s the new song, which was aided and abetted by hillside contemplation and a punk poet’s advice.

“Patti Smith was saying that you don’t have to look far or wide, and it doesn’t have to be complicated or expensive or madness in order to find things to soothe you in life, or to be happy about,” she says, sitting at the kitchen table where she writes her songs. “Sometimes just the sky makes everything fall into perspective.”

Up on the hill, at that magic time of day when there is little day remaining, the sky can take on colors that escape linguistic description. A person can feel a strangely comforting smallness amidst the expanse. And thirty years of sublimity, shit storms, and all points in between can boil down to a bemused cosmic shrug.

Doors: 6:30 Show 7:30 Tickets $49.50-$75