Mary Chapin Carpenter - The Dirt And The Stars

 

Mary Chapin Carpenter returns with The Dirt And The Stars

The Dirt And The Stars is the newest album from singer-songwriter Mary Chapin Carpenter. The five-time Grammy winner has sold 15 million records and is the only artist to have won four consecutive Grammy Awards for best female country performance.

In a press release, Carpenter describes The Dirt and the Stars as a collection of songs with "no sugar coating" (quote via MusicRow). Its 11 tracks "are very personal and they're difficult in some ways, and definitely come from places of pain and self-illumination, but also places of joy, discovery and the rewards of self- knowledge," Carpenter says.

"They arrived from looking outward as much as inward, speaking to life changes, growing older, politics, compassion, #metoo, heartbreak, empathy, the power of memory, time and place," Carpenter adds. "So, I suppose I could say there are many themes, but they all come back to that initial idea that we are all constantly 'becoming' through art and expression."

The Dirt and the Stars, to be released via Lambent Light Records / Thirty Tigers, was produced by Ethan Johns and recorded live at Real World Studios, which is owned by Peter Gabriel, in Bath, England. Carpenter wrote the project at her farmhouse in rural Virginia.

"The writer Margaret Renkl once said, 'We are all in the process of becoming.' That doesn't stop at a certain age," Carpenter explains in the release. To be always a student of art and music and life, as she says, that, to me, is what makes life worth living. It's certainly what makes me want to still write songs."

The Dirt and the Stars follows Carpenter's 2016 album The Things That We Are Made Of, her last collection of all-new material, and 2018's Sometimes Just the Sky, which features newly recorded versions of some of her best-loved songs, along with one new track.

 

 

1. Farther Along And Further In

2. It's OK To Feel Sad

3. All Broken Hearts Break Differently

4. Old D-35

5. American Stooge

6. Where The Beauty Is

7. Nocturne

8. Secret Keepers

9. Asking For A Friend

10. Everybody's Got Something

11. Between The Dirt And The Stars

12. Traveller's Prayer

13. Our Man Walter Cronkite

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