Post Description

Country-folk singer-songwriter Mary Chapin Carpenter has been through a lot in the past five years. In 2007, she cut short a tour because of a sharp pain in her chest that turned out to be a pulmonary embolism. Since then, she went through a divorce and her father passed away. So her 12th album is a record of loss.
 

"It's about the journey," she said in a recent interview. "What it feels like to let go, to address grief, to feel that emptiness. To not be afraid to feel that emptiness. We spend a lot of our energy pushing things away, because it's too painful. It's about the place you get to when you can no longer push it away; you have to go through it."
 

Reflecting that journey, the mostly acoustic album opens with a gentle traveller's tale. Transcendental Reunion finds the singer on an aeroplane at night - detached from the busy, twinkling world below, then queuing in the impersonal banality of the arrivals hall. There's envy for those met by outstretched arms and dry humour in her weary prayer at the baggage carousel before she heads into the day.
 

The melody is based on the simple, repeated rise and fall of a seven-note phrase, backed at a laid back strummed and picked pace. To be honest, it's quite hard to tell apart from many of the other meditative, mid-tempo, mum-rock songs on the record. And yet all command attention because of Chapin Carpenter's warm, weathered, unshowily authentic voice which has a kind of peace at its core.
 

Verenigde Staten
Country
Label: Rounder


1. Transcendental Reunion 
2. What To Keep and What To Throw Away 
3. The Swords We Carried 
4. Another Home 
5. Chasing What's Already Gone 
6. Learning the World 
7. I Tried Going West 
8. Don't Need Much To Be Happy 
9. Soul Companion 
10. Old Love 
11. New Years Day 
12. Fading Away 
13. Jericho