My mom bought me the album for my birthday (lovelovelove) and I've been listening to it while I drive around town. I always seem to go through a funny process whenever I get a new MCC album: I listen to it once and immediately decide I hate it. All of the stuff that feels familiar is inferior to earlier work and all the new things are too foreign and I don't like her new direction.
Then I listen again.
And again. And after a few days I start to think, "Okay, that one song is okay. I guess."
And I keep listening.
And next thing you know, I'm singing along and really listening to the lyrics. I decide I maybe like it. I still have reservations.
Then I forget about the album for three months or so and when I hear it again it brings tears to my eyes.
So: before I go and forget about Ashes and Roses, I wanted to blog about it.
If anyone who doesn't know me has been reading this blog, they'll have already heard me mention Mary Chapin Carpenter. If anyone who does know me is reading, they'll know that she is like a second mother to me. I listen to her music when I'm exceedingly sad, when I'm ecstatically happy, when I hate the person I am, when I love where my life is going. When I was a child, I used to listen to her tape and pretend she was sitting at the end of my bed, playing me to sleep. Her music is like a hug, which sounds ridiculously cliche. True, somehow, nonetheless.
Ashes and Roses comes from a painful place for MCC, I think. It sounds the most like Between Here and Gone, which is not a bad thing. Both albums remind me more of poems than music.
Between Here and Gone came out as I was preapring to leave Bennington in my sophomore year. This was a terrible time for me and that album did not save me. I relied heavily on Fall Out Boy's Folie A Deux to distract myself, and I give the Saved Me Medal to that album. What Between Here and Gone did was quietly lay a blanket down and wait for me to fall onto it. When FOB stopped distracting me and I broke, which happened often that year, MCC was there to stoke my head. She never told me that it was going to be okay, but she did tell me that I would keep going.
The thing that I love about Chapin is that I know I will always listen to her music. FOB may have won that year, but I think I've listened to them once in 2012. Yesterday I belted one of Mary Chapin Carpenter's songs in the car. The day before that I sang with her while I cooked. Right now I'm humming along and typing. Two summers ago I slow danced, alone, in a rehearsal hall. When I lived in Buenos Aires she was with me while I rode the bus home from Olivos and it rained and rained. When I was eight years old, I walked onstage at the talent show and promptly forgot all my weeks of careful choreography. I just let her and sing and I made the whole fucking thing up.
My point is thus: go out and buy Ashes and Roses. Or, better yet, go buy Between Here and Gone. Especially if you're lost. Or Party Doll and other Favorites, if you want to dance. Or Time, Sex, Love, if you are so. ready. to. move. on. Or A Place in the World, which is still my favorite album, if you want to hear what it first sounded like when I began a lifetime affair with my favorite artist.
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