Mary Chapin Carpenter Personal History

I started writing the songs on this album as the pandemic began winding down; the titular song “What Did You Miss” pointed the way forward, with its final verse: “I’ve been writing it down/song by song/as a personal history” when imagining this collection of songs as memoir, and how the wisdom that comes with growing older becomes a north star, whether one is celebrating life’s joys or navigating life’s inevitable losses. From the first verse of “Paint + Turpentine” about sitting in the dark of the Birchmere Music Hall watching Guy Clark teach a master class in songwriting and story telling, to coming to terms with how later life turned out in “Girl and Her Dog”, to inventorying what matters in “The Saving Things” to discovering the wisdom in words and phrases that we usually roll our eyes towards in “Say It Anyway”, it is my hope that these songs allow the listener to come away not only with a musical sketch of my life from young adulthood on, but also an affirming reflection of their own life as well.