Everything You'll Ever Know Is in the Choruses
How a Mary Chapin Carpenter song articulates what I feel about musical epiphanies
‘The writing process remains as fascinating to me today as it did when I first began writing as a teenager; the excavation, the digging through things that become an exploration of life, it’s the most satisfying thing I know.’
This post wraps up my exploration of the songs of Mary Chapin Carpenter. It focuses on just two songs and then has a section that is partly about my own experience and partly an attempt to connect the themes of these posts to some scholarly writing. That reflects part of who I am, just as Carpenter’s songs and the things they bring to light are part of who I am.
As I’ve said in the previous two posts, Carpenter is an artist whose music I’ve known for a long time. She’s been a good companion for a large chunk of my listening life. Just as important, though, the reflection she offers in her songs has worked well with my own reflections over the years and some of the professional writing and scholarship I’ve done. Her music encourages me to follow my own memories and try to capture some of them.
Memory, and the way it gets entangled in objects, has remained a theme in Carpenter’s recent work, such as her album The Dirt and the Stars, released in 2020 to generally positive critical response.
Writing for Pitchfork, Sam Sodomsky praised the way the new songs grappled with memory and loss. One of the tracks Sodomsky highlights is ‘Old D-35’, a song written in memory of Carpenter’s former musical collaborator John Jennings. This song takes its title from a classic Martin guitar, one that Jennings used and which was also made famous by a host of performers, including Johnny Cash. Carpenter lines up objects in the song to the extent that it becomes a kind of list or catalogue song. Like ‘These Foolish Things’, the objects summoned in ‘Old D-35’ are a catalogue of loss, and they are given a similar quality of continued presence in the narrator’s life:
As long as there's a sky turning into darkness after day As long as you and I are standing in a photograph in a frame As long as there's a vine of summer squash and peach pie on a sill
And then, more concisely:
An old hat in the hallway The way the light turns gold Twilight on a fall day And the sound of your old D-35
Memory, loss, bereavement, what remains, the traces of a life: visual, tactile, sonic. As Sodomsky observes, Carpenter has a gift for showing ‘how a quiet sound can summon a world of associations’.
Epiphanies
The album’s almost-title track, ‘Between the Dirt and the Stars’, rests on an epiphany, one described by Carpenter in an interview posted on her website during the promotion of the album:
‘I was 17 years old; it was the summer that I had graduated from high school. It was one of those moments you remember, being with your friends, with a gauzy nostalgia, because you’re young, without responsibility, without any sense of limits. The sense that everything unknown is ahead of you brings feelings of being both liberated and lost…It was 1 in the morning and The Rolling Stones’ “Wild Horses” was on the car radio. I remember leaning my head back, closing my eyes. It may have lasted only 30 seconds, but the lyrics had a through line to my heart and I felt suspended in time. I was imagining it was the happiest I had ever felt and the saddest at the same time. Isn’t that duality at the heart of every mystery we experience as human beings? It was just one of those moments I wish I could put it in amber, hold it forever … Everything I’ve ever felt, every place I’ll ever dream of finding as well as every place I’ve ever been, can be found in a trance-like memory of riding in a car on a hot summer night listening to the radio.’
‘Trance-like’ is how much of Carpenter’s work feels and what feeds into some of the more critical responses to her work that I mentioned in my previous post. Going back to those critics, we might conclude that being a reliable songwriter and performer is a blessing and a curse. In reliability lurks predictability and stasis. These are anathema to much pop (despite frequent condemnations of pop repeating the same thing over and over), which is perhaps why an otherwise seemingly Carpenter-like songwriter such as Taylor Swift should go for so many stylistic shifts while chasing the pop dream. (That is not a criticism of Swift or pop, as I hope other things I’ve written about both make clear, just an observation of how the game plays out.)
Another word for Carpenter’s reliability might be style. Style is one of those things that can suggest fleetingness (fashion, the latest style) or timelessness (classic, eternal style). When Taylor Swift sings about never going out of style, it seems at surface level in homage to classic looks and attitudes, but to have one’s own style is also important. (Swift knows this, of course, and articulates it well in much of her work). Carpenter has a style that is offered to the listener as something to engage with if they wish.
At times over the years I have found that style not to be the one I needed at that moment. At other times, it has been exactly right. The reliability of the songs and Carpenter’s consistency as a writer and performer put me in mind of lines from another of my favourite songwriters, Guy Clark: ‘one I have chosen / to walk through my life / like a coat from the cold’.
Here’s the title track from The Dirt and the Stars.
This is the song from which I’ve borrowed the title of this week’s post:
‘Everything you'll ever know / Is in the choruses’
That line resonates with me so strongly. Carpenter’s song articulates things that have always been vital to me: the epiphanies we find through music, the way that music speaks to us of experiences we’ve had and those we’ve yet to encounter but anticipate.
As part of some writing I’m preparing about Guy Clark, I was recently watching a video of a conversation between Tamara Saviano—author of the Guy Clark biography Without Getting Killed or Caught and director of the film of the same name—and Sarah Jarosz. As well as discussing Clark’s influence on her, Jarosz talks about her experience of getting into several Texan (and other) singer-songwriters when she was young:
‘I hadn’t lived enough life to really be able to understand the soul and the depth behind the words. And so it was kind of the sense of loving it from an early age, loving the vibe, but then it took until now … to circle back to it and have the second rediscovery as an adult … I love that with music … I had sort of a visceral experience with it as a young person and then a very active experience with it as an adult. And I think it says a lot about the music to be able to have different layers of uncovering things about the songs.’
Again, this really resonates with me. Jarosz articulates my own feelings about the initial pull towards music that seemed to offer life lessons and glimpses of experience that I recognised as important though I hadn’t yet lived them. She also, crucially, mentions the return to these formative sonic moments and the layering of experience that happens over a life of listening and making music. That she does this by referring to several songwriters who first got me thinking about those things just makes her words richer for me.
There’s something here of what the psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas calls ‘the unthought known’, the sense that there are things and experiences waiting to transform us and that we may just need an object—what Bollas calls an evocative or transformational object—to help us get there.1 (I’ve written about this before, here for example). We know that art can transform us and we seek out the artistic objects and experiences that can bring about that transformation. But we are also taken by surprise by artistic objects and experiences, as seems to be the case in the experiences described in Carpenter’s ‘Between the Dirt and the Stars’ and Jarosz’s recollections of early musical encounters.
This tension between the things that unexpectedly transform us and those we go in search of is played out in many works of art. In my previous post, I mentioned a famous memory object, the madeleine cake in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. When Proust’s narrator tastes a madeleine dipped in tea as an adult, it immediately evokes his childhood for him and brings with it an overwhelming rush of associations from his youth. This is the involuntary memory, the one that takes us unawares. But there is also the search that Proust’s narrator embarks on: the search for lost time, the reconstruction of his life that will lead to the writing of a massive book about memory and time. This is the voluntary memory, the deliberate search through the past. This may be excavating pleasant memories, or, as I mentioned last time around, it may be digging up bones.
In 2015 I published a book about time, age and experience in popular music that was a point on a trajectory that had begun many years earlier, long before I’d ever considered going into academia or researching and writing about music professionally. The idea was relatively simple and one that I recall striking me as a teenager and young adult whenever I got into long, passionate discussions with friends about musical discoveries or epiphanies.
I became increasingly aware that what I was hearing in my favourite singers and songwriters, what was coming through to me in the songs I was drawn to, was an articulation of experience that I could recognise even when—perhaps especially when—I hadn’t experienced the things I felt I was understanding. My favourite musicians seemed to be relating stories and lessons to me that just seemed right, that I would find myself mentally nodding in agreement with, or feeling that I was now able to see something clearly that I had previously just glimpsed. It was like I’d rounded a corner, or opened a murky window.
Years later when, writing The Late Voice, I attempted to capture something of this early experience, mashing it up with what I’d learned in the interval by reading artists and scholars who’d written about memory, experience, time and other big topics. I remembered some of the musicians who had set me on that path and whose work I still regularly returned to. Mary Chapin Carpenter was one of them, though I didn’t manage to fit her into my book. Five years later, as songwriters so skilfully do, she articulated that early experience I’d felt in three verses, a bridge and a repeated chorus, then had guitarist Duke Levine sign off with a long solo that reiterated the argument and the feeling wordlessly.
She sings that everything we need to know is in the choruses, yet she leaves so much to Duke Levine to say. It’s the kind of solo I want to describe as ‘lyrical’; it’s a guitar gently weeping, occasionally screaming, working through the folds and nuances of shifting emotions and realisations. It’s the kind of solo I could imagine Prince using to say all the things he hadn’t been able to say in the words of ‘Purple Rain’. As Carpenter puts it in the interview posted on her website, ‘That [guitar solo] is just like the part of the movie with the car going down the road on this luminous, humid night’. It’s part of the story, part of the memory, another chorus.
The year I listened to The Dirt and the Stars was also the year I read Christopher Bollas more intensely than I had before. Bollas had explained that epiphanic feeling years earlier. ‘Objects’, he wrote,
‘often arrive by chance, and these aleatory objects evoke psychic textures which do not reflect the valorizations of desire. We have not, as it were, selected the aleatory object to express an idiom of self. Instead, we are played on by the inspiring arrival of the unselected, which often yields a very special type of pleasure—that of surprise. It opens us up, liberating an area like a key fitting a lock. In such moments we can say that objects use us, in respect of that inevitable two-way interplay between self and object world and between desire and surprise.’2
We are played on by the inspiring arrival of the unselected. There’s that involuntary process again, but Bollas tells us that it’s not just about memory and the past. It’s about anticipation and the future too. It’s about the possibility of transformation, the moments we recognise that something has the potential to change us.
In an essay about this aspect of Bollas’s theory, James Grotstein summarizes the passage above by noting a ‘significant distinction between objects we not only desire but also unconsciously create, on one hand, and objects which come into our lives by unpredictable chance, the latter of which “object-use” us. Another implication of the effect of the aleatory object is that it seems to unearth or cause to epiphanize the “unthought known” within us’.3
The title Grotstein uses for his essay, ‘Love Is Where It Finds You’, could easily, to my mind, be a Mary Chapin Carpenter song.
Are all evocative object songs sentimental? Perhaps. Perhaps they all indulge in loss or desire, either offering the possibility of transformation or confirming a suspicion of unchanging loss.
Are objects innocent? Often objects are invoked as reminders of innocence, as mute witnesses of our past. But it is precisely in their ability to evoke that they lose their innocence, becoming guilty of causing our regression to an earlier state and enhancing the possibility to consider our present state an unhappy one. The key to overcoming this might be recognising in the present which objects we will use to return us to this moment and, in doing this forward planning, learning to appreciate them now.
Here’s a final quotation, this time from Graham Harman, reviewing Sherry Turkle’s book Evocative Objects: Things We Think With:
‘Objects may be partly autonomous and individual, but they can also summon the worlds to which they once belonged. They not only have a history that gives them their present shape, as with the axe-head, but can also revive the times to which they once belonged. A song can briefly reawaken a dead love, and a specific physical place might turn the calendar back 20 or 30 years. In this sense, objects are interrelated in a web of associations—but not all objects at all times. It takes special objects, evocative objects, like a madeleine or a rolling pin, for the symphony of memories to begin. To state lazily and fashionably that ‘‘everything is connected’’ would be to deprive specific objects of their specific powers. Our experience shows the opposite: namely, that one object evokes certain things and not others, and that some objects evoke nothing at all. Yet between certain objects there are bridges, footpaths, or resonant intervals that awaken vanished times.’4
Not all objects are evocative, then, and not all are connected. But they do offer opportunities for connection, for jumping from one seemingly random object to another until we realise that the trails of objects, or those resonant intervals, are not so random after all. They are, in fact, the narrative that traced the story of a life.
This is something I hear over and over in Mary Chapin Carpenter’s songs. And it’s something I believe is true of song more generally, of songs as evocative objects that lead us to certain places, that take us unawares, transform us and then later remind us of that transformation, perhaps offering new ways to transform us again.
Where might song take us next?
Christopher Bollas, The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known (London: Free Association Books, 1987); Christopher Bollas, Being a Character: Psychoanalysis and Self Experience (London: Routledge, 1992); Christopher Bollas, The Evocative Object World (London: Routledge, 2009).
Christopher Bollas, Being a Character, 37.
James S. Grotstein, ‘“Love Is Where It Finds You”: The Caprices of the “Aleatory Object”’, in The Vitality of Objects: Exploring the Work of Christopher Bollas, ed. Joseph Scalia (London: Continuum, 2002), 83.
Graham Harman, ‘Zeroing in on Evocative Objects: Sherry Turkle (Ed.), Evocative Objects, MIT Press, 2007’, Human Studies 31, no. 4 (December 2008): 453.