Music & Concerts
A D.C. homecoming for Mary Chapin Carpenter
Mary Chapin Carpenter readies sold-out Birchmere engagement
Looking at lyrics for her new album made Mary Chapin Carpenter realize she’s still asking questions. (Photo courtesy Sacks & Co.)
After a four-year break from new material, 2016 finds Mary Chapin Carpenter back with her 14th studio album, “The Things That We Are Made Of.”
Since the release of 2012’s “Ashes and Roses,” the five-time Grammy winner has toured with fellow singer-songwriter Shawn Colvin; released and toured with her 2014 symphonic album, “Songs From the Movie”; and toured an acoustic show last year.
Carpenter will be wrapping up the end of a busy touring year performing two sold-out shows at the Birchmere Dec. 6-7. A few last-minute tickets may be available when the box office opens each evening at 5 p.m.
Carpenter recalls her early days performing at the Birchmere, looking back and being labeled a country artist during a phone chat from her home in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
WASHINGTON BLADE: What are your memories of singing at the Birchmere?
MARY CHAPIN CARPENTER: I don’t know when the exact first time I ever had a show there. I started playing there in the early ’80s as an opener and as part of other groups. It’s much bigger than it used to be. The new Birchmere has been there a long time now. The old Birchmere used to be about a quarter of the size. It really was an intimate space and one of the premier listening rooms in the country. Now they can bring bigger shows and there’s more seats, but it’s still such a revered listening room.
BLADE: Does it feel the same playing there now?
CARPENTER: You mean the same feeling of being nervous and scared? Yes! (laughs)
BLADE: You’ve played the Birchmere and Wolf Trap many times. Do you have a preference?
CARPENTER: They’re so different. I don’t prefer one over the other. Certainly, the Birchmere being more intimate, it’s an opportunity to be more free wheeling and chatting with the audience where with Wolf Trap, it’s so vast, but it’s still possible to feel the collective energy of 7,000 people. I feel so lucky to be a resident of this area in the sense that I have two hometown stages that mean the world to me and they’re both very different, but they’re both deeply meaningful to me in terms of my career and what it feels like to play music. I have gone to both as a listener for so long before I had the good fortune to play those stages, they’re just treasures.
BLADE: Tell us about your current tour.
CARPENTER: It’s actually been a few years since I toured with a band, so reconvening the band incarnation with brand new music just lifts you up and makes you feel energized with new players and new music.
BLADE: And your new album?
CARPENTER: What this record is about in my mind, it’s about asking questions. When I laid down all the lyrics to proofread, it’s an odd thing, it wasn’t until I did that, looked at each song physically next to one another that I realized that so many of the lyrics in the songs are posed in the form of the question. What it made me feel was that given the subject matter that it’s far more important when you reach a certain time in your life to just feel that you’re still asking questions and you’re still curious and you’re more comfortable with the idea of not knowing because you can’t have all the answers and that’s OK. It’s just remaining open, inquisitive, open-hearted, alert to everything around you and accepting.
BLADE: When you listen to “The Things That We Are Made Of,” it’s distinctly different than your last album, “Ashes and Roses.” Do your albums reflect where you currently are in the different stages of your life?
CARPENTER: Yeah, I hope so. I heard this wonderful interview with Anne Patchett, she was on Diane Rehm and I was listening to it. She’s one of my favorite authors and she said something that I don’t remember the exact words, but I’ll paraphrase, it was every book she’s written has led to the next one. It made a lot of sense to me as someone who tries to create these sort of worlds where every couple years another world exists, a world of song. This record, I understand where people say it’s very different or whatever, but from my position it doesn’t feel so much different as a natural next place to go.
BLADE: Looking back is a recurring theme in your work. Is that a conscious decision?
CARPENTER: I just can’t help it (laughs). I think songwriting, as a creative form of expression, I mean, on one hand it’s a deeply personal exercise and you’re trying to express your feelings, trying to express yourself within the world and it’s about connection as well. That’s the gift of live music of course. When we’re in our 20s and 30s and even in our 40s, I think we have a sense that life is going to last forever. It’s only when the challenges, the losses, the changes in our lives, the loss of parents or a health issue that tend to come upon us as we reach the mid point. Those are the things that kind of stop you in your tracks and not so much teach you, but alert you to the fact that no, you’re not going to live forever. There’s a reason people have crises at times of their lives because mortality is a difficult thing to grasp.
BLADE: We all have moments in our lives where things are constantly changing whether we want them to or not. How do you deal with the unexpected?
CARPENTER: You have to be comfortable not being in control. I think of myself, my personality is I like order out of chaos. I like things to be organized, I like to know what I’m doing. It’s just this disillusion idea that I’m in control, but I’m not. The greatest test for me is when things blow up and you sort of have to regroup. You have to feel that all’s not lost. The idea is when you’re a younger person, is that when things blow up, “Oh my God, it’s the worst thing that ever happened,” but later in life, there’s a freedom that comes around where you’re not so invested or — it sounds so Oprah like — but you’re not so attached to the outcome. You’re able to handle a blow up and realize it’s not the end of the world.
BLADE: When did you first notice you had a gay following?
CARPENTER: It’s funny to me because I never think about it. It’s never been something I ever sort of thought about it. So in that regard, I guess I have no idea. I’ve always been so happy just to look out into the audience and see people.
BLADE: How does it feel testing out new songs on the road?
CARPENTER: It helps me to sort of hone the song. I go into the studio with 25, 30 songs and I don’t record all of them, but I have a sense of what I think are the strongest and playing them out and getting a sense of how they feel that way, as opposed to just playing them in my house. It does sort of weed things out.
BLADE: Will you be doing anything special next year for your 30th anniversary in music?
CARPENTER: Next year marks the 30th anniversary of my first record (“Hometown Girl”) so we’re talking about a project, something special to kind of mark it and a live record is certainly on the list.
BLADE: Does it ever bother you being labeled a country artist?
CARPENTER: It’s not something I reject. I spent 20 years on the Nashville Columbia label. It was an incredible opportunity and I got to reach so many people. It’s given me everything I use today and it’s allowed me to go where I’ve wanted to go. I think of starting out and having this label, “country” as nothing I could reject in anyway and I’m proud of the music and the times and everything we did during those years. That said, I don’t think it really applies to me anymore. Furthermore, I grew up listening to all sorts of music. Labels were for soup cans as the saying goes. It’s just not something I paid a whole lot of attention to and made to feel to be a big deal. I just sort of feel like we all play music and we just want to connect with who we connect with.
Mary Chapin Carpenter (Photo courtesy Sacks & Co.)
Music & Concerts
Underdog glorious: a personal remembrance of Jill Sobule
Talented singer, songwriter died in house fire on May 1
I’ve always prided myself on being the kind of music consumer who purchased music on impulse. When I stumbled across “Things Here Are Different,” Jill Sobule’s 1990 MCA Records debut album on vinyl in a favorite Chicago record store, I bought it without knowing anything about her. This was at a time when we didn’t have our phones in our pockets to search for information about the artist on the internet. The LP stayed in my collection until, as vinyl was falling out of fashion, I replaced it with a CD a few years later.
Early in my career as an entertainment journalist, I received a promo copy of Jill’s eponymous 1995 Atlantic Records album. That year, Atlantic Records was one of the labels at the forefront of signing and heavily promoting queer artists, including Melissa Ferrick and Extra Fancy, and its roster included the self-titled album by Jill. It was a smart move, as the single “I Kissed A Girl” became a hit on radio and its accompanying video (featuring Fabio!) was in heavy rotation on MTV (when they still played videos).
Unfortunately for Jill, she was a victim of record label missteps. When 1997’s wonderful “Happy Town” failed to repeat the success, Atlantic dumped her. That was Atlantic’s loss, because her next album, the superb “Pink Pearl” contained “Heroes” and “Mexican Wrestler,” two of her most beloved songs. Sadly, Beyond Music, the label that released that album ceased to exist after just a few years. To her credit, the savvy Jill had also started independently releasing music (2004’s “The Folk Years”). That was a smart move because her next major-label release, the brilliant “Underdog Victorious” on Artemis Records, met a similar fate when that label folded.
With her 2009 album “California Years,” Jill launched her own indie label, Pinko Records, on which she would release two more outstanding full-length discs, 2014’s “Dottie’s Charms” (on which she collaborated with some of her favorite writers, including David Hadju, Rick Moody, Mary Jo Salter, and Jonathan Lethem), and 2018’s stunning “Nostalgia Kills.” Jill’s cover of the late Warren Zevon’s “Don’t Let Us Get Sick” on “Nostalgia Kills” was particularly poignant as she had toured with him as an opening act.
Jill was a road warrior, constantly on tour, and her live shows were something to behold. My first interview with Jill took place at the Double Door in Chicago in early August of 1995, when she was the opening act for legendary punk band X. She had thrown her back out the previous day and was diagnosed with a herniated disc. To be comfortable, she was lying down on a fabulous-‘50s sofa. “I feel like I’m at my shrink’s,” she said to me, “Do you want me to talk about my mother?”
That sense of humor, which permeated and enriched her music, was one of many reasons to love Jill. I was privileged to interview her for seven of her albums. Everything you would want to know about her was right there in her honest lyrics, in which she balanced her distinctive brand of humor with serious subject matter. Drawing on her life experiences in songs such as “Bitter,” “Underachiever,” “One of These Days,” “Freshman,” “Jetpack,” “Nothing To Prove,” “Forbidden Thoughts of Youth,” “Island of Lost Things,” “Where Do I Begin,” “Almost Great,” and “Big Shoes,” made her songs as personal as they were universal, elicited genuine affection and concern from her devoted fans.
While she was a consummate songwriter, Jill also felt equally comfortable covering songs made famous by others, including “Just A Little Lovin’” (on the 2000 Dusty Springfield tribute album “Forever Dusty”) and “Stoned Soul Picnic” (from the 1997 Laura Nyro tribute album “Time and Love”). Jill also didn’t shy away from political subject matter in her music with “Resistance Song,” “Soldiers of Christ,” “Attic,” “Heroes,” “Under the Disco Ball,” and the incredible “America Back” as prime examples.
Here’s something else worth mentioning about Jill. She was known for collaboration skills. As a songwriter, she maintained a multi-year creative partnership with Robin Eaton (“I Kissed A Girl” and many others), as well as Richard Barone, the gay frontman of the renowned band The Bongos. Jill’s history with Barone includes performing together at a queer Octoberfest event in Chicago in 1996. Writer and comedian Julie Sweeney, of “SNL” and “Work in Progress” fame was another Chicago collaborator with Sobule (Sweeney lives in a Chicago suburb), where they frequently performed their delightful “The Jill and Julia Show.” John Doe, of the aforementioned band X, also collaborated with Jill in the studio (“Tomorrow Is Breaking” from “Nostalgia Kills”), as well as in live performances.
On a very personal note, in 2019, when I was in the process of arranging a reading at the fabulous NYC gay bookstore Bureau of General Services – Queer Division, I reached out to Jill and asked her if she would like to be on the bill with me. We alternated performing; I would read a couple of poems, and Jill would sing a couple of songs. She even set one of my poems to music, on the spot.
Jill had an abundance of talent, and when she turned her attention to musical theater, it paid off in a big way. Her stage musical “F*ck 7th Grade,” a theatrical piece that seemed like the next logical step in her career, had its premiere at Pittsburgh’s City Theatre in the fall of 2020, during the height of the pandemic. The unique staging (an outdoor drive-in stage at which audience members watched from their cars) was truly inspired. “F*ck 7th Grade” went on to become a New York Times Critic’s pick, as well as earning a Drama Desk nomination.
In honor of the 30th anniversary of Jill’s eponymous 1995 album, reissue label Rhino Records is re-releasing it on red vinyl. Jill and I had been emailing each other to arrange a time for an interview. We even had a date on the books for the third week of May.
When she died in a house fire in Minnesota on May 1 at age 66, Jill received mentions on network and cable news shows. She was showered with attention from major news outlets, including obits in the New York Times and Rolling Stone (but not Pitchfork, who couldn’t be bothered to review her music when she was alive). Is it wrong to think that if she’d gotten this much attention when she was alive she could have been as big as Taylor Swift? I don’t think so.
Music & Concerts
Tom Goss returns with ‘Bear Friends Furever Tour’
Out singer/songwriter to perform at Red Bear Brewing Co.
Singer Tom Goss will bring his “Bear Friends Furever Tour” to D.C. on Sunday, June 8 at 8 p.m. at Red Bear Brewing Co.
Among the songs he will perform will be “Bear Soup,” the fourth installment in his beloved bear song anthology series. Following fan favorites like “Bears,” “Round in All the Right Places,” and “Nerdy Bear,” this high-energy, bass-thumping banger celebrates body positivity, joyful indulgence, and the vibrant spirit of the bear subculture.
For more details, visit Tom Goss’s website.
Aussie pop icon Kylie Minogue brings her acclaimed “Tension” world tour to D.C. next Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. at the Capital One Arena. Tickets are still available at Ticketmaster.
The show features songs spanning her long career, from 1987 debut single, “The Loco-Motion,” to “Padam, Padam” from her album, “Tension.”
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