|
Mary Chapin Carpenter (born February 21, 1958) is a five-time Grammy Award-winning American country/folk singer-songwriter and guitarist with a diverse musical style.
Carpenter was born in Princeton, New Jersey to Mary Bowie Robertson and Chapin Carpenter, Jr., a Life Magazine executive. Carpenter spent two years in Japan as a child, moving to Washington, D.C. in 1974. She attended Princeton Day School, a private coeducational day school, before graduating from the Taft School, a Connecticut prep school, in 1976. Carpenter has described her childhood as a "pretty typical[ly] suburban," with her musical interests defined chiefly by whatever albums her older sisters had lying around. This included records by The Mamas & the Papas, the Beatles, and Judy Collins, along with some Woody Guthrie albums of her mother's.
Carpenter spent much of her time in high school playing the guitar and piano; in fact, while at Princeton Day School, legend has it that "classmates threatened to cut her guitar strings if she played 'Leaving on a Jet Plane' one more time."
Despite her interest in music, Carpenter says she never considered performing publicly until, shortly after graduating from Taft, her father suggested it. "He said, 'There's a bar down the street, they have open-mike sessions, why don't you go out and play at one of those things?'" Carpenter recalled for Rolling Stone in 1991. "That was the first time it occurred to me, frankly." She added that the audience was "polite," but that she "wanted to throw up."
Carpenter graduated from Brown University in 1981 with a degree in American Civilization. She considered music a hobby at first, and, despite playing some summer sets in Washington's vibrant 80s music scene for extra money, kept on thinking she'd eventually get a "real job." At those gigs, most played in bars, Carpenter developed a serious drinking problem. "I had a big problem," she later recalled. "It was awful. I had to make a lifestyle change in a drastic way. It's still so painful to me to think about how I was."
Thinking that music was part of the problem, Carpenter stopped performing and began interviewing for regular work, though when someone offered her a position she "panicked," and became determined "to go back into music but [to] change some things." She decided to play only original material, rather than covers, and she also quit drinking. Within a few years, Carpenter had landed a manager and recorded a demo tape that led to a deal with Columbia Records.
In the spring of 2007, while on the road with the new CD The Calling, Carpenter experienced back and chest pain. Making light of it, she continued to perform until the pain was unbearable. At the emergency room, she learned she had a series of small blood clots in her lungs—pulmonary embolisms. This medical situation caused Carpenter to cancel her summer 2007 tour.
|
