Exclusive: Mary Chapin Carpenter Shares Her ‘Personal History’ and Her ‘Greatest Regret’

July 12, 2025 5:45 am

Mary Chapin Carpenter burst into country music in the ’90s with her infectious folk melodies, cute bob, button nose, and everywoman quality. She sliced through the bright lipstick, teased hair, and sometimes slick production of the era.

This summer, the Ivy League-educated Carpenter released her 17th album, Personal History. Bonny Light Horseman’s Josh Kaufman produced the project, which Carpenter recorded live at Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios in Bath, England. She solo-wrote the entire 11-song album.

“I’ve been writing songs by myself for 25 years,” Carpenter told American Songwriter. “I don’t even think about it. It’s just that’s what I’ve been doing for so long. I never really knew what co-writing was until I got a record deal. It was just me sitting down with my guitar, and a legal pad, and a pencil and an eraser. That was just the way I did it.”

Carpenter was born in New Jersey, spent time in Tokyo as a preteen, and then moved back to the U.S. with her family to Washington, D.C., where she played cover songs in local folk venues. By the early ’80s, Carpenter was writing original material. By the late 1980s, she had signed a record deal with Columbia Records. While her first album didn’t win mainstream success, she broke through with State of the Heart (1989) and Shooting Straight in the Dark (1990). However, her Come On Come On in 1992 won commercial and critical acclaim. The album was home to hit songs, including “Passionate Kisses,” “I Feel Lucky,” and “He Thinks He’ll Keep Her.” The RIAA certified the album quadruple platinum, which means 4 million albums shipped to sell.

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Mary Chapin Carpenter Writes Solo

The 67-year-old singer-songwriter has sold 17 million albums, won five Grammy Awards, and charted 27 songs on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart, including her No. 1 song from 1994, “Shut Up and Kiss Me.”

However, Personal History isn’t entirely reminiscent of her sassy sing-alongs. The 11 songs are introspective, slow-to-mid-tempo storytelling pieces and comprise her most autobiographical album to date. But don’t ask her how she did it. Explaining her process makes her nervous.

“I don’t really have it all mapped out,” she said. “It’s just a lot of trial and error. A lot of it is writing a whole lot of shit, throwing it out and starting over. It’s about keeping a lot of stuff around, returning to it, and having fresh eyes and ears on it. You have like a piece of stone, and you’re just kind of chipping away at it until it takes on a form that seems to make sense.”

She trusts her gut to tell her when she’s written the songs that say what she wants to say, and she’s ready to go into the studio to record. While writing Personal History, she knew early in the creative process that she was treating the songs as a memoir.

“It Felt Different”

“It felt a little different this time,” she said. “It felt like I was connecting dots and returning to stories that I had carried around in my back pocket for a really long time.”

Carpenter offered “Paint + Turpentine” as an example. Years ago, before she gained mainstream success, Carpenter opened for national touring acts at Birchmere Music Hall in Alexandria, Virginia. The proprietor knew she didn’t have much money and told her that if an artist was playing at his venue and she wanted to come, he would get her in. She took advantage of the offer and still remembers going to see Guy Clark.

“It was like a masterclass in songwriting,” she said. “I can’t tell you how many nights I’d spent sitting in the dark, just listening to him and thinking endlessly about what I’d heard and how he created these worlds.”

Years later, Carpenter started visiting Nashville, and Clark invited her to co-write with him. She was so intimidated by the invitation that she found ways to dodge the ask.

Guy Clark Intimidated Mary Chapin Carpenter

“I was a very shy person and didn’t have a whole lot of confidence,” she said. “I just could not fathom how I would be able to sit across a table in his studio in his basement and try to write something with this person that I revered so deeply.”

She was young and wrongly thought the opportunity would come around again when she was wiser or more confident.

“It was just one of the greatest regrets of my life that I didn’t have the courage to do that,” she said. “I carried that regret around forever, and then in the course of writing this record, it was that was one of the stories I wanted to try to tell.”

“Paint + Turpentine” is about Clark and includes snippets of truth she plucked from his life.

“He always used to say, ‘If you think about it, write it down,’” she said. “It’s a story that begins with Guy and ends with him, but it’s also about self-acceptance and learning how to not so much let yourself off the hook but try to understand why you were there in the first place on that hook and how to let it go with grace and with appreciation for all that you’ve learned in the meantime.”

A Girl and Her Dog

A woman in a vintage truck inspired Carpenter to write “Girl And Her Dog” one day when she and her dog, Angus, were walking in one of her favorite spots on her hot summer day. She woke up early to beat the heat and marveled at the miles of gravel paths around her.

She heard a car behind them and stepped off the path to let the car pass. She saw the woman’s salt-and-pepper hair and her two dogs. Carpenter swooned and began making up a life for the woman in her head. The singer decided the woman had just finished walking her dogs and was going back to her farm to have another cup of coffee and write at her kitchen table. Carpenter also enjoys writing at her kitchen table.

Her neighbor recently told her that when she turned 60, she felt invisible to the outside world. It wasn’t the first time Carpenter heard that and recognized the statement as truth soon after her birthday.

“At that time, I was just looking for mentors and examples of how to navigate this new season of life in a way that made me happy and productive and reinforced my sense of identity and purpose and meaning,” she said. “Entertainment tends to make that very difficult. As she drove by and I started making up this life for her, I realized I want to be her. The next thought was, ‘Wait a minute, maybe I already am her.’ That made me feel just so deeply comforted and so inspired and so revved up.”