The Things That We Are Made Of
Like last week’s post, this one is named after a Mary Chapin Carpenter song, the title track of a 2016 album. Last time around I wrote about the song ‘This Shirt’ from the 1989 album State of the Heart. Here, I want to consider some other Carpenter songs from subsequent albums and their use of objects to communicate experience. I’ll cover songs written from the perspective of things (in this case, a town), songs about the way we map the things of our lives onto the events of our lives, and songs about the layering of memory, experience and taking stock. The things that we are made of are an inventory of the self and of the selves who’ve played a part in shaping who we are and how we ended up here and now and like this.
‘A blur from the driver’s side’
‘I Am a Town’, from 1992’s Come On Come On, and later revisited on 2014’s Songs from the Movie, is an evocative list song. As the title suggests, it’s narrated from the perspective of a town rather than a person. A town is made of many things, so the ‘I’ keeps shifting in the song, from the town to the things from which it’s made.
Location is established from the outset:
I'm a town in Carolina I'm a detour on a ride For a phone call and a soda I'm a blur from the driver's side
From here the song moves into a list of things the town represents: ‘the last gas for an hour’; ‘dust you leave behind’; ‘peaches in September; ‘corn from a roadside stall’; ‘the pines behind the graveyard’; ‘weeds between the graves’; ‘a church beside the highway’; ‘billboards in the fields’; ‘an old truck up on cinder blocks’. Carpenter is always good at the imagery of Americana: here we get references to Texaco and tobacco, Pabst Blue Ribbon, 'Southern Serves the South' (the logo of the Southern Railway), ‘the Jaycees sign’.
It's not surprising to find that the song has been subject to a similar fan treatment on YouTube as ‘This Shirt’, with an unofficial video of imagery associated with the lyrics. The one linked to above has the expected pictures of smalltown America edited to the song’s soundtrack. It attracted some criticism for making visually explicit what at least one commenter felt Carpenter wanted listeners to visualise themselves. This reaction seems to have been in the minority, at least of those who commented on the song and video, but it does highlight an aspect of my Songs and Objects project that I guess is fairly obvious: objects are used by lyricists and singers to put pictures in our heads. Perhaps what the critical YouTube commenter had a problem with was something we saw in the comments to the ‘This Shirt’ video: everyone has their own ‘this shirt’ and everyone has their own imagined or remembered town. Some listeners would rather have songs leave the details vague enough for them to do their own translation work.
Personally, I’ve always been fascinated by the way we can hear someone else’s highly specific memories and relate them to our own experience. This is something I started thinking about a lot when I read Joe Brainard’s book I Remember, with its mix of highly personal and collective—albeit US-centric—memories. I thought about it again when I read versions of Brainard’s text—not translations, but regional versions—by the French author Georges Perec and the English author Gilbert Adair. Many of Mary Chapin Carpenter’s songs are versions of the ‘I remember’ template—vivid anecdotes that mix the personally specific with the collectively recognisable—and I think this is one of the reasons I’m so drawn to them.
Memory is a recurring theme in Carpenter’s work. ‘I am memory and stillness’, she sings in ‘I am a Town’, ‘I am lonely in old age / I am not your destination / I am clinging to my ways’. Carpenter has spoken of the song as recreating a kind of town that has probably disappeared in reality, that lives on in memory and myth.
I’m reminded of Iris DeMent’s beautifully sad song ‘Our Town’, which hymns a disappearing small American town. (It’s a song also translated gorgeously to another critically nostalgic context—Northern England—in a cover by Kate Rusby). There’s a similar wistful sense of a place fixed in history, a place that some live in, some have left, and some have only passed through, ‘on the rural route’ as Carpenter sings. What lives have been lived there? What glimpses can be caught by passersby? Seeing the fading of such places offers a reminder of what, in another song, Carpenter refers to as ‘all the things that finally desert us’.
‘Burn the lists and letters’
That last line comes from ‘It Don’t Bring You’ on State of the Heart, a personal favourite but not one I feel pressed to apply an object-oriented reading to. Closer to my theme is ‘What to Keep and What to Throw Away’, from the 2012 album Ashes and Roses. This song offers advice on how to deal with a loss (in this case divorce; it could equally apply to bereavement or other separations). It underlines how, in such situations, we have to deal with the traces that people leave behind, while also being aware of the painful memory work that objects can bring about.
That’s a classic country trope, which I aim to explore in other posts on Songs and Objects. Think, for example, of the opening lines of George Jones’ ‘Good Year for the Roses’: ‘I can hardly bear the sight of lipstick on the cigarettes there in the ashtray’. Carpenter’s narrator in ‘What to Keep and What to Throw Away’ is not wallowing in quite the abject misery that Jones’ is. She’s practical: ‘These are your instructions’, she sings, ‘Sit down with pen and paper / Begin with something hollow / Like the last words that he offered’.
In format, ‘What to Keep and What to Throw Away’ is not completely a list song or catalogue song, like those I’ve previously written about. But there are several objects and pseudo-objects contained within the lyrics: ‘his winter coat’, a crumpled note in the pocket that offers its own instructions: ‘milk and Sunday paper’. ‘Fold it up and box it before you've time to think’ she sings. ‘Avoid familiar back roads / Erase the old phone numbers / Delete all the photos’.
Later, there are more instructions:
Fill up every journal Empty every shoebox Burn the lists and letters Sweep out all the old thoughts
What at first appears to be stoicism is challenged by occasional glimpses of what lies beneath, what may come creeping to the surface. One of the instructions is to take a deep breath.
It’s a struggle, just like that laid out in the Hoagy Carmichael classic, ‘I Get Along Without You Very Well’. That song, as memorably performed by Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra and Nina Simone, offers superficial bravery in the face of loss, boasting about a survival that is tempered by the song’s famous list of exceptions: I get along without you, ‘except when soft rains fall’, ‘except when I hear your name’, ‘except perhaps in Spring’. You can try to control voluntary memory but beware of involuntary memory, the traps that lie in wait when you look too closely into what you’ve lost. If you want to avoid pain, you’d be advised to avoid ‘diggin’ up bones’, as Randy Travis puts it in a classic country recording from the 1980s.
Thom Jurek, reviewing Ashes and Roses, wrote that ‘Carpenter's language, both musical and lyrical, though rich in melody, color, texture, poetic metaphors, and images, never flinches from looking at her subject squarely’. This accords with what many have said about her, though some reviewers found the tone of the songs on this and other releases of the last decade and a half too samey.
It’s something I’ve occasionally felt over the years when listening to Carpenter and I think it’s one of the reasons I lost track of her career for a while between the nineties and the past decade. Even now, when her new releases pop up on Spotify feeds, I sometimes feel a sense of over-familiarity. But then I’m always pulled back by a vocal tone, a melodic twist, an image or a turn of phrase, an observation so evocative it steals my breath. That was certainly the case when I heard the 2016 album The Things That We Are Made Of, which reminded me how much I’d valued Carpenter’s particular line in lyrical evocation over the years.
‘The map I won’t forget’
The opening track, ‘Something Tamed Something Wild’, presents objects in different configurations, such as the ‘shoebox full of letters / bound up neatly with some twine / Each one … like a diamond’. ‘What else are there’, asks Carpenter, ‘but the treasures in your heart?’. She goes on to sing about ‘a map I've memorized of / Everywhere I've ever been / And the faces of everyone I've / Loved and left to try again’. One line that grabs me every time is when she sings ‘I'm staring down the great big lonesome’. Hearing this, I’m taken by the idea that loneliness is something you can look down. Loneliness enhances the temptation to look through memory for company.
This isn’t a list song, but it almost becomes one towards the end, when, using a neat songwriter’s trick, Carpenter makes a new verse by summarising the objects that featured in previous verses. In what I think is s stunning piece of summative poetry, she sings:
There's the shoebox full of letters There's the map I won't forget The voices and the lessons And the signals that connect us Manifested to the spirit Way deep down where it goes unseen by the eye
The metaphor of the map returns in another song on the album, ‘Map of My Heart’. This song touches on features explored earlier in ‘I Am a Town’ and ‘This Shirt’. The heart as mapped by Carpenter is one containing ‘one-way streets’, ‘old detours’ and ‘dark dead ends with missing signs’. The heart is a thing, of course, one of the most hymned objects in popular music; it’s also the thing worn on the sleeve in ‘This Shirt’. Maps, like songs, are condensations of wider worlds, not the world but its representation. They are blueprints for narratives or, as the song puts it, ‘stories we tell tracing the routes’.
Hearts, memories and places feature again in the album’s title track, a song also covered by Joan Baez in 2018. A splendid metaphor arises mid-song when Carpenter sings
If the past’s another country I’m at the border with my papers Where is your heart if not inside you? Where is home or are you lost? Where is love if not beside you I had no answers but they let me cross
Here, a well-known metaphor is questioned and expanded. The opening line of L.P. Hartley’s 1953 novel The Go-Between is ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there’. Carpenter throws just the faintest doubt on whether that’s the case before accepting that it may well be true and, if it is, what do you have to prove to be able to get access to the past? She is full of doubts but at least she has her papers, the device that allows the memory journey to take place. For Proust’s narrator in search of lost time, it was the madeleine; for Hartley’s, it was a childhood diary; for Carpenter’s, it seems to be a passport made from something like ‘the moment captured in a place’ described in the opening verse.
‘I decided to name the record The Things That We Are Made Of’, Carpenter explained, ‘because it seems to bring together so many of the themes that run through this record, among them the power of memory, the power of place, the natural world. The things that we are made of: everything from a scar that I have on my wrist to the way the end of a summer day feels and how that informs who you are’.
Not immediately obvious as an object-oriented song, ‘The Things That We Are Made Of’ nevertheless refines these ideas and, I would argue, encapsulates much of Carpenter’s other work. As a title and refrain, it has both reflected and influenced my own thinking about the roles of objects in our lives and the memory prompts and affective feelings that inspire life writing and reflection. The song presents memories and feelings and a sense of what has been lost to the past. These are the things that we are made of, the layering of experience in our lives.
With the third verse, a list of sorts arrives:
Like the silence of my shadow when the twilight world is calling The loneliness that knows me by the cadence of my walking And the scar upon my elbow and the sound of my own breathing My reflection in a window and the way I’m always leaving
Shadows are traces we leave briefly on the world; as metaphors, they often refer to longer lasting legacies. Cadences are rhythms we settle into, how we get to feel a semblance of comfort, or at least habitation, within our bodies and the things they endure. Scars are traces and experience; breathing is rhythm and what gives us away. Reflection is what we have access to when we linger; leaving is what we do when we can’t.
‘I remember driving down the rutted roads late at night’. The opening line of ‘The Things That We Are Made Of’. Each time I hear it, I think of roads I’ve driven down. Not all of them are rutted, not literally. Perhaps all of them are rutted by memory, or is it memory itself that’s rutted? Right now, I’m thinking of a road in South West England, near the Cornwall-Devon border, a particular tree I notice every time I drive that stretch, the way a slowly unfurling bend moves the tree from the left to the right of the motorway as you approach. A moment of disorientation. A moment I always want to capture in the moment and for other moments (like now), but I never can because my hands are on the wheel and my attention has to snap back to the unfolding road and what else is happening. Perhaps that’s why it’s always the one I think of later, an attempt to catch something fleeting.
I’m a long way from there now. I have more immediate memories, like the start of this winter morning and the way that felt. The road and the tree and the morning are a few of the things I am made of.
“Personally, I’ve always been fascinated by the way we can hear someone else’s highly specific memories and relate them to our own experience.”
This is something I absolutely love about music and books! Hearing someone write about something I’ve never lived yet knowing exactly what it feels like.
Great post!