A faded piece of cotton. Shiny silver buttons. A town in Carolina. A detour on a ride. A crumpled note in your pocket. A shoebox full of letters. An old hat in the hallway. The way the light turns gold. Twilight on a fall day. The map of my heart.
These are some of the things that appear in the songs of Mary Chapin Carpenter. They are, to use the title of one of her songs, ‘The Things That We Are Made Of’. That title would serve as a pretty good description of what I’m trying to write about on Songs and Objects. The things and objects of our lives find themselves arranged in newly evocative ways in songs, while songs themselves become evocative things that help to tell life stories.
This post is not about the song ‘The Things That We Are Made Of’. I’ll return to that one another time. This one is about ‘This Shirt’, another Carpenter song and one I always knew I would have to write about when I set out on this project. I’ve known this song a long time, so this is also a piece of life writing, inspired as much as anything by thinking about how the songs we dress ourselves in become vital parts of who we are.
My version
I’ve been a fan of Mary Chapin Carpenter’s music since hearing her second album State of the Heart in 1989. At that time, I was listening to a lot of US and Canadian musicians who traversed the boundaries between folk, country, pop, rock and what would come to be known as ‘Americana’ music. That tag can be a vague one but I think it fits Carpenter’s work quite well, not least in terms of how she’s used a range of quintessentially North American images, names, events and objects in her songwriting. The objects, scenes and sentiments that she’s evoked in her songs have a rich correspondence with literature, painting, photography and film that gets labelled as Americana.
I came to Carpenter’s work as a fan of what had been marketed in the 1980s as ‘new country’, artists such as Steve Earle, Nancy Griffith, Lyle Lovett and Lucinda Williams. Steve Earle had been a bridge for me between the rock music I’d listened to as a teenager and the country music that I was becoming increasingly drawn towards. I heard something in Earle’s music that hinted at a world I felt I identified with, even though I knew nothing of it beyond what I’d gleaned from books, films and music.
A similar thing happened with Nanci Griffith, who connected the folk music and singer-songwriter music I was starting to love with the world of Texas country artists. When Griffith died in 2021, I was reminded just how strong an influence she’d had on me when I was younger. When I read tributes by artists such as Mary Gauthier and Lyle Lovett and saw people posting videos of Griffith performing with Mary Chapin Carpenter, the Indigo Girls and others, I was reminded of the connections Griffith had forged for me at that time. Griffith, Earle and Lovett would in turn be my keys to an earlier generation of progressive country artists: Guy Clark, Townes Van Zandt, John Prine and many more.
In 1989 I started working in a record shop, an ideal place to discover new artists. I’d play albums by Earle, Griffith and Lovett, and I recall vividly the day I put on Lucinda Williams’s self-titled album on Rough Trade that had been released the previous year. With this kind of listening history, I was doubtless primed to pick out and then enjoy Carpenter’s State of the Heart when it arrived that summer. I recall loving most of the songs but having a particular soft spot for ‘This Shirt’, the album’s fifth track. It’s too long ago now for me to recall whether I was already getting interested in the use of objects as lyrical devices; more likely I just thought the lyric was based on a simple but clever concept and I liked the tune, the singing and the arrangement. All those things are still true for me. But in recent years the song has also taken on a defining role in building my fascination with songs and objects.
The released version
The song’s title is ‘This Shirt’ and these are the words that start each of the six verses as well as several of the other lines within them. There is no chorus, just a set of verses built around seven or eight lines that communicate recollected scenes and events in which the shirt has played a role: as an item of clothing worn to ‘every boring high school dance’; as a pillow on a train journey through Italy; as a blanket shared by two lovers; as something lost and then found again; as a place where a cat gave birth to five kittens; and ultimately as a ‘grand old relic / with a grand old history’, a faded and torn piece of cotton worn now while doing household chores, half-hidden beneath a jacket.
The lack of chorus places the song more in a ballad tradition, though there are changes made to the melodic structure of some of the verses which provide variety and give the song a set of emotional contours. This seems apt for a song about memory and the paths of free association that a journey into memory can provide. Memories come freighted with emotional highs and lows, and also with seemingly neutral reportage: the news stories of our lives condensed into flashpoint moments. Changing the melody at the start of some of the verses is a way to keep musical interest and momentum, but also a way of dealing with the peaks and troughs of recollection: ultimately a way of controlling the past and lessening its unexpected danger.
If it wasn’t obvious enough that this is a song about memory, a few lines in verse five underline the point, breaking with the song’s regular meter to assert that
This shirt is just an old faded piece of cotton Shining like the memories Inside those silver buttons
The shirt is a proxy for memory. Or, we might say, it is memory itself, the thing that remembers, the object that enhances its owner’s ability to recall the past. If that’s too much of a stretch, perhaps we can at least think of the shirt as a mnemonic, a device for assisting the memory process. That is not what it was designed for, of course, nor what it has mostly been used for: but it is what it has become. This may be why the first and sixth verses of ‘This Shirt’ are set in the present and the rest, for the most part, in the past. These verses frame the narrative and position the shirt as an everyday and ever-present memory prompt, a reminder that memories are ultimately located in the here and now.
The only repeated lines in the song appear at in the second half of verses one and six:
I wear it beneath my jacket With the collar turned up high So old I should replace it But I'm not about to try
The shirt represents memories the narrator expresses no desire to replace. But lest we think that this is a subject trapped in the past, in memories from which she cannot escape, I read the shirt’s current status—as a practical item worn for everyday chores—as proof that the past and its traces can be folded into the present, that they can inform our thinking without trapping us. Carpenter may have been mapping the ‘state of the heart’ in the songs on her 1989 album, just as Nanci Griffith had mapped the ‘lone star state of mind’ two years earlier, but neither artist was equating states with stasis. There is space for reflection and learning in these songs as well as ample space for moving on.
‘This Shirt’ has remained a staple in Carpenter’s catalogue, appearing on compilations and in live performances and concert recordings. It was also one of the songs she chose to re-record on her 2018 album Sometimes Just the Sky. In a commentary accompanying that album, Carpenter described the genesis of the song as a shirt that she had to hand during an intensive songwriting period for what would become State of the Heart.
‘I had this old shirt and I had all these anecdotes about it … I have a picture from the High School yearbook of me wearing it at a dance … I was trying to use the shirt as a vehicle to speak about a lot of other things and it was very autobiographical … It just holds so many memories. You’re speaking about a shirt but you’re trying to talk about a whole lot of other things too, because it just conjures up so many things as a talisman.’
I love this idea of the shirt as talisman, as something that’s used both in the sense of being worn and faded, but also actively used as a ritualistic device. When I heard Carpenter use that word ‘talisman’, my mind shot to the writings and photographs of Patti Smith, another great songwriter who is drawn to talismans.
The original promotional video for ‘This Shirt’ (see above) features Carpenter and her fellow musicians surrounded by windblown laundry. Other than this nod to fabric, it’s a straightforward performance-based video, focussing on instrumental details—guitar strings, percussion, a piano keyboard—rather than depicting the shirt or any of the scenes described in the narrative. Under the version posted on YouTube in 2009, several viewers have posted comments about the resonance of objects for recalling life narratives. One writes, ‘I have my duffel bag issued at Ft Jackson in 1983 and went all over the world until 2007. Strange how we become attached to inanimate objects.’ Another has posted: ‘what a great subject to sing about. We can probably all relate to it in some manner. A favorite pair of shoes, boots, jacket, sweater, pocket book, hat, even an old car’. A third writes: ‘We all have our own "this shirt", whatever it may be, that defines our life's journey. That's the beauty of this song, that we all relate in our own way.’
That’s just it, and that’s why I can describe the items listed in my opening paragraph—ones I have borrowed from the lyrics of Mary Chapin Carpenter songs—as ‘things that we are made of’ even when I haven’t experienced some of them. We make the substitution, taking other people’s evocative memory objects and replacing them with our own. That’s why Linda Grant can claim, in her book The Thoughtful Dresser, ‘I could write my autobiography in terms of analysing my clothes from birth to present’ and we can be fairly certain it would be relatable and instructive. Wonderful proof of this can be found, by the way, in my former colleague Lyn Thomas’s project Clothes Pegs - A Woman's Life in 30 Outfits.
There’s another video of ‘This Shirt’ on YouTube from 2011, an unofficial one. It’s one of those videos that tries to depict the lyrics of a song in a literal visual manner by editing a collection of photos together. Amidst the many photos of women wearing shirts, there are pictures of shiny buttons, cats and hearts on sleeves (wearing a heart on the sleeve is one of several metaphors within a metaphor that Carpenter uses in the song; that’s the kind of literate songwriter she is). I’m generally not a fan of these photo stories depicting song lyrics, but there is one aspect of this video and others like it that resonates with my interest in songs and objects, and that is the perspective given to the song when one focuses on the objects referred to within it. In this sense, there’s a connection between the official video for ‘This Shirt’ and the fan video in that both are interested in objects. One fetishizes the objects used to perform it (the instruments) while the other looks to the things from which the lyrics are constructed.
The homespun version
There are also, of course, videos of Carpenter performing ‘This Shirt’ live, ranging from when it was still quite new (such as this television performance from 1990) to more recent returns. Of the more recent ones, the version included in Carpenter’s ‘Songs from Home’ series stands out as another layering of the songs-as-objects idea.
Speaking to Evan Smith in an interview promoting Sometimes Just the Sky in November 2018, Carpenter mentioned the importance she placed on live performance and being able to share her songs with her audience:
‘the thing I love to thank the audience for, and the thing I feel most strongly about, is to thank them for being there, for supporting live music. Because we can get any song, any book, any work of art, any poem, anything from that tracking device. But it’s always going to be between us and that screen, and there’s never going to be a substitute for being together and the energy and the sense of being on a journey together that the live performance of some kind of art gives you. And we’ve never needed that more.’
That possibility for connection was, of course, tested to extremes over the next couple of years and the digital interface became the place where the experience of the crowd and of community was redirected.
‘Songs from Home’ was Carpenter’s response to the Covid pandemic and the shutting down of that live connection. Beginning on 18 March 2020 and running for 62 episodes until 21 March 2021, the series featured Carpenter performing songs in her Virginia farmhouse and sharing them through Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. All episodes are archived on Carpenter’s YouTube channel.
‘This Shirt’ featured in Episode 19 of the series, broadcast on 21 May 2020. The clip includes references to Carpenter’s dog Angus and her cat White Kitty, both of whom became well-known to her audience during the series.
As ‘This Shirt’ is one of the songs that I’ve been thinking about for a long time in connection with the Songs and Objects project, I’ve become used to reading online comments about how the idea of the companion object resonates with listeners. What starts to happen during the comments left in response to the ‘Songs from Home’ series is that we now get a mixture of reflections on the song lyrics and the new life the songs take on as objects offered in comfort and community during lockdown. Some comments are about the comfort of the home performances, some about the song, and these get woven together into a collectively authored narrative about things that people can rely on.
One of the comments left under the home version of ‘This Shirt’ quotes from Grant’s The Thoughtful Dresser. Here’s a slightly longer version of this much-cited passage:
‘Clothes as text, clothes as narration, clothes as a story. Clothes as the story of our lives. And if you were to gather together all the clothes you have ever owned in all your life, each baby shoe and winter coat and wedding dress, you would have your autobiography. You could wear, once more, your own life in all its stages, from whatever they wrapped you in when you emerged from the dark red naked warmth of the womb, to your deathbed.
As if the textile itself has memory, formed as it does out of its intimate closeness with our bodies, a coat or a dress or a pair of trousers is a witness to the fact that once we went for a job interview, or on a hot date. Or that we got married. The dress was there with us, it’s proof of who we once were.’
The YouTube commenter who attaches Grant’s observations to Carpenter’s song is spot-on. While they don’t make a comment about the conditions by which this particular version of the song has come about—the enforced distance from performer and audience—their comment sits comfortably among neighbouring ones more focussed on the importance of continued connection during lockdown and the sense of intimacy that Carpenter was bringing to her weekly posts.
As well as being a songwriter invested in the role of evocative and transformational objects, Carpenter deals with elements of intimacy and connectedness and community in her work. In this sense, I don’t see her live-streamed performances as simply a case of ‘the show must go on’, but rather as ways of bringing to new presence a set of ongoing (and pre-pandemic) concerns about how objects and events mediate life experience. There was an attuning that Carpenter’s audience had already undertaken and that she and they could activate to create the intimacy these events required.
I think the way that songs can do such evocative work with objects has a lot to do with being technologies of both intimacy and distance. Intimate connection is all over the songs of Mary Chapin Carpenter and the responses to those songs by her audience. But that connection can act remotely because song, as musical mediation, can carry things across great distances. I think that songs are ways of turning things into non-things and, through the rituals attached to singing and listening, converting non-things back to things we can connect to even when (especially when?) we can’t touch them, or each other.
A brief ‘see also’ coda
There’s a lot more to say about ‘This Shirt’ and other clothes-based songs. We might, for example, want to compare Ashley McBryde’s 2018 song ‘The Jacket’, based on a similar conceit. We might want to remember Dolly Parton’s ‘Coat of Many Colors’, as fine a piece of clothing-as-life-writing as you could wish for. We might like to follow in the footsteps of Patsy Cline as she sings Hank Cochran and Velma Smith’s ‘Shoes’ and takes a metaphor for an extended walk. Or think about a clothes-based journey through Taylor Swift’s songs, from little black dresses and evocative scarfs to cardigans and the costume-change-as-autobiography of the Eras shows. I’ll put some videos below and invite other suggestions for this topic.
At the start of this piece, I referred to songs as things we dress ourselves in. There are other connections that occur to me between clothing and music: the reference to music as ‘material’; the putting-on of records and clothes; the idea of music as enveloping or cocooning, as the fabric of our lives. Some interesting metaphorical rabbit holes to explore, perhaps?