Mary Chapin Carpenter took something of a road trip through her life on her 14th studio album, the months-old “The Things We Are Made Of.”
“This record is about a lot of questions,” the 58-year-old Americana/country singer-songwriter said from her tour bus in Montana last Friday. “It wasn’t until I had all the lyrics side by side on my kitchen floor and I was looking at them all that I saw that in every song there were questions in the lyrics running throughout. What it made me feel like is that, consciously or unconsciously, I’ve sort of reached a point in my life that I understand finally that it’s far more important to ask questions and not be attached to the answers.”
Carpenter said she tries to balance her career hits — “Passionate Kisses,” “He Thinks He’ll Keep Her,” “Shut Up and Kiss Me,” “I Feel Lucky” — with cuts off that latest album in her live shows, including at Fox Tucson Theatre on Saturday, Sept. 24.
“There are so many levels to this record and I could talk about it for days,” she said of “The Things We Are Made Of,” which was released in early May. “It was a wonderful new experience with a new producer. For that reason it felt very new and different. But at the same time ... I’ve always felt like one record leads to the next. ”
The album follows her 2014 orchestral album “Songs From the Movie,” which led her into a surprising new journey performing with symphony orchestras.
“It was incredible and I had never done anything like that before and I was terrified I wouldn’t be able to pull it off,” she said of her first symphony show in early 2014. “But I loved it, every minute of it. ”
Carpenter, whose 30-year career has traversed country, pop and adult contemporary music, comes here at the tail end of a string of fall dates that included stops in Washington State, Oregon and throughout California before she hits us on Saturday. She has a show Sunday, Sept. 25, in Scottsdale then goes back to California for a few more shows before taking a week off.
“My job is to make records and write songs. But playing for an audience, the sense of connection and being together, is hard to describe,” Carpenter siad. “It’s the most wonderful feeling.”
