Mary Chapin Carpenter - The Calling
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CD Details
Artist: Mary Chapin CarpenterEdition: Music CD
CD Release Date: 2007-03-06
Music Label: Zoe Records
Soundtracks:
- Calling
- We're All Right
- Twilight
- It Must Have Happened
- On and on It Goes
- Your Life Story
- Houston
- Leaving Song
- On with the Song
- Closer and Closer Apart
- Here I Am
- Why Shouldn't We
- Bright Morning Star
Music reviews of The Calling
Music Review: Thanks for sharing your political views.
Rating: 5 Stars
Unlike the reviewer Gilchrist, I'm glad artists like Carpenter, Springsteen, The Dixie Chicks and many others aren't shy about sharing their political views. Those who want to control our speech and political perspectives would prefer that people just ignore politics, or advance a politics of happy talk and god-blessing ourselves. Fortunately, most people refuse to be mind-numbed dittoheads and can deal with critical thought. Carpenter's politics are of the sort that are promoted in the Bible, which include working for social justice Yes!. There are plenty of right-wingers in this country who choose silence and complicity with America's corporate-military matrix The Corporation, and there are 'artists' like Lee Greenwood to entertain them. Other people prefer that artists mix their craft with awareness of the realities of the world, such as the catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina When the Levees Broke - A Requiem In Four Acts (Documentary). Regarding 9/11, it was a horrific attack, but the death toll was small compared to what U.S. state terrorists have been inflicting on other countries for generations Rogue State, 3rd Edition: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower.
Carpenter was prescient in suggesting that the U.S. could have decent people in elected office again, as the Obama revolution has proven; but there is another revolution that is taking place in places like Venezuela and Brazil. That movement is based on grassroots power, not the power of politicians Beyond Elections: Redefining Democracy in the Americas, and it is advanced by musicians who don't care about the voices who threaten them with lost sales.
Here are a few other artists who have been raising consciousness, much to the dismay of authoritarian thought police:
Come on Now Social
Stay Human
Sonic Jihad
Body of War: Songs That Inspired an Iraq War Veteran
Description of The Calling
As a songwriter and performer, Mary Chapin Carpenter has long since transcended the traditional notions of genre and style, finding widespread acclaim for her poetic, elegantly - observed compositions. The Calling, her first release for Zo??/Rounder, is the most topical album she's made in her twenty-year career. While it unequivocally addresses issues both public and political - from the after-effects of Hurricane Katrina to religious zealotry to the trial-by-radio of the Dixie Chicks -- there is also something deeply personal about this extraordinary collection of songs. The album is a powerful, provocative meditation on the mysteries of fate and circumstance, which mingles timeless questions with contemporary issues. Introspective, defiant and deeply resonant, The Calling is a profound set from one of modern songwriting's most distinctive voices.Featuring "It Must Have Happened," "We're All Right," and "On with the Song."
In recent years, Mary Chapin Carpenter--once among the most promising stars of the folkie infiltration of Nashville ("Down at the Twist and Shout," "I Feel Lucky")--abandoned all desire to dot the country music charts. Free of that ill-fitting yoke she returned to being what she really was all along: A literate acoustic singer-songwriter. In 2004, she released a tour de force, Between Here and Gone, which combined affecting social commentary on the events of 9/11 with personal meditations on her changed life as a married woman living in rural Virginia. The Calling picks up where that album left off, using the same co-producer, pianist Matt Rollings, and core musicians, including John Jennings, who helped Carpenter shape her sonic landscape some 20 years ago. If the new album goes farther in advocating a political conscience--"On with the Song" takes jabs at the jingoistic rubes who dissed the Dixie Chicks, while "Why Shouldn't We" insists we'll have worthy heroes in office again one day--it largely invokes the same quiet, warm, and conversational tone as its predecessor. On the whisper-soft "Twilight," which frames a perfect, peaceful evening with a nearly spiritual grace, a listener might easily imagine himself chatting with the artist about long-held secrets and shared experiences, the Blue Ridge Mountains looming in the background. That is part of Carpenter's gift--connecting with her audience's shadow self, using her deeply nuanced alto to fill even the simplest words with profound knowing. As a pure craftsman, however, she ranks with the giants of past generations in capturing the small, bruised hearts seemingly lost in the chaos of a catastrophic event. "Houston," one such song here, recalls Woody Guthrie's great "Deportee" in its power and the pathos of the Hurricane Katrina victims who were forced to evacuate their homes, leaving everything behind but fear and hope. "Mama's got her baby/Sleeping in a grocery cart," it begins, at once setting up a picture of wrenching desperation. Carpenter, no stranger to blue moods herself, knows how tough it is to emerge from a dark period of pained restlessness to find one's very self again. The album's soothing closer, "Bright Morning Star," like much of the record as a whole, offers a beacon of light and safe harbor for those shipwrecked on life's rocky shores. --Alanna Nash
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