“What to Keep and What to Throw Away,” a key song from Mary Chapin Carpenter’s 2012 album Ashes and Roses, tells the story of a recent divorcee sorting through her ex-husband’s belongings. With its sparse, second-person narrative and hushed fingerpicking, it plays something like a passage from Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking put to music. Heard in the context of Carpenter’s remarkable recent work, this song is perhaps her defining track: a propulsive series of quiet thoughts expressed with a novelistic eye for detail in her immaculate, articulate whisper. But it also feels like a mission statement.
Just like the narrator of “What to Keep and What to Throw Away,” Carpenter followed Ashes and Roses by taking stock of her own career, reimagining some of her finest compositions backed by a symphony orchestra. Songs from the Movie from 2014 was a pleasant enough album but, like Joni Mitchell’s similarly-minded Travelogue, it couldn’t help but feel like an epilogue: the kind of statement an artist makes once she’s said everything she set out to say. That album’s sense of finality may be partly why the arrival of The Things That We Are Made Of—Carpenter’s 14th album and her first produced by David Cobb (Jason Isbell, Sturgill Simpson, Chris Stapleton)—feels like such a pleasant surprise.
Cobb’s sparse, raw production is a welcome change of pace for Carpenter, an artist whose lush, country-leaning work has often slipped comfortably into adult contemporary radio, belying her characteristically complex songwriting. On Things, Cobb knows exactly how to complement Carpenter’s work to make her music sound as urgent and intimate as her lyrics. The minimal electric guitars that linger in the background of “The Middle Ages” are sparse and haunting, while “What Does It Mean to Travel” floats with a spacey Ghosts of the Great Highway weariness. Single and centerpiece “Map of My Heart,” meanwhile, is the jauntiest song Carpenter has put her name to since the ’90s and serves as a reminder of just how influential her particular intonations have been for today’s crop of country-pop crossovers.
It is in this song that Carpenter summarizes the theme of the album in two crucial lines: “I learned how to travel/Just what I can carry.” From the literal journey at the heart of “Livingston” to the more symbolic one in “Deep Deep Down Heart,” nearly every song on Things is tied to the road, giving the album the feel of a long, lonely late night drive. Like many long drives, however, this one gets a little dreary near the end: “Note on a Windshield” tries and fails to transcend the banality of its central metaphor, while the closing title track aims for hymnal and lands closer to lullaby.
The album does itself no favors by stacking all of its most exciting moments at the beginning, and crowding the five-minute ballads together at the end. Still, these are small concerns for a record whose very presence feels like a refreshing return to action. With 11 songs in just under one hour, Things is Carpenter’s briefest collection of new material in over a decade and serves as a fine entry point for newcomers. It is not her most revelatory work, but it is a strong, concise statement from an artist moving more swiftly and confidently than ever—carrying only what is absolutely necessary, and leaving the rest behind.
