Mary Chapin Carpenter, who releases her fifth album, Stones in the Road (Columbia), on Oct. 4, is the rare performer who is of her audience, not above it. Over the past few years, Carpenter has not only helped drag country music into the ’90s, but has become the Everywoman. She doesn’t dress ultrachic; she doesn’t have hair that looks as if it were twisted into shape by three sets of hands. And her songs stay literally close to home. “Middle Ground,” from her 1990 album “Shooting Straight in the Dark,” is about a working girl whose family doesn’t understand why she chooses to remain single. “He Thinks He’ll Keep Her,” from her 1992 album “Come On Come On,” tells the story of a good little wife who one day decides she’s had enough. Writing songs about women, for women, may seem like a simple enough idea, but in the realm of country and pop it’s prac-tically revolutionary. Carpenter’s characters know how to be alone, and they know how to take care of themselves. When their hearts get stomped on, they just smoke another cigarette, drink another beer and move on.
This realness has made Carpenter one of the major crossover successes of her generation. “Come On Come On” has sold 2.5 million copies, and is still on the pop and country charts after more than two years; it spawned a phenomenal seven hit singles, one of which is just now trickling off country radio. “Stones in the Road” is a substantial and rewarding follow-up. Its 13 tracks, all written solely by Carpenter (who also coproduced), draw on influences ranging from straight folk to jangly country-rock to Irish traditional; Carpenter has always had a base in the contemporary folk-bluegrass scene, and songs like “Jubilee” and “Why Walk When You Can Fly” venture further from mainstream country than she has dared since her breakthrough. She’s a skilled narrator, both perceptive and articulate: in “Outside Looking In,” a single woman looks wistfully at the gold bands on other couples’ hands, yet never turns self-pitying. And “House of Cards” is a casual slap at the suburban American Dream that works so smoothly, you hardly notice how nasty it is.
Carpenter, raised in Princeton, N.J., and educated at Brown University, brings real insight to her dissections of home and family; her language is sometimes dense, but her voice has a plain-spoken clarity. She makes being ordinary seem like a virtue. Sure, there are times when we want pop stars to be bigger than life, above and beyond us. But every once in a while, it helps to have one who walks right here among us.