It’s been five years since the last studio album by the inestimable Mary Chapin Carpenter, the lyrical and intimate The Dirt and the Stars, recorded at Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios in Bath, the second of two projects with producer Ethan Johns released towards the end of the first lockdown. One of the delights of that grim period was Carpenter’s weekly livestreams from her Virginia farmhouse, Angus the Golden Retriever a frequent on-screen presence. While they were never curated and released on CD, she did record a live album at Wolf Trap, a 26-song solo set with no audience present, One Night Lonely, which received a Grammy nomination. A tour was planned with Sean Colvin, but a shoulder injury caused Carpenter to cancel.
A collaborative project was a long-held ambition – in 2017, she had teamed up with the Indigo Girls and Joan Baez in the Four Voices tour, which regrettably never reached Britain. The current collaboration with Karine Polwart and Julie Fowlis, both of whom had crossed musical paths with the American, was Carpenter’s idea, hatched during Covid, trialled through the ether, and cemented at Kinlochmoidart House during 2023’s Celtic Connections. It was the first staging post on the path that would lead to Looking for the Thread, recorded in Bath in just one week.
Their voices, each distinctive, harmonise and intertwine beautifully throughout the 10 songs, four of them written by Carpenter, with four by Polwart and Fowlis solo and with other collaborators. The remaining two are traditional, sung in Scottish Gaelic, the album opening with the exquisite “Gradh Geal Mo Chridhe” (familiar in English as “The Eriskay Love Lilt”), recorded for Fergie MacDonald, the “Ceilidh King”, who died in April last year. The trio is backed by guitars, piano, accordion, bass, and percussion, with Irish musician Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh playing hardanger d’amore, a sort-of 10-string fiddle – five are bowed, the remaining five resonate as sympathetic strings. Its presence is felt most keenly on the title track, composed by Carpenter, which sums up the album.
Seeking a thread was their quest, songs spun one around the other in an organic way. The trio is especially delighted at “the geekiness” of three of them: “Satellite” (Carpenter, who previously looked heavenward with ”When Halley Came to Jackson” on Shooting Straight In the Dark); “Rebecca” (Polwart), and “Silver in the Blue” (Fowlis), written respectively from the perspective of a decommissioned NASA zombie spaceship condemned to drift forever; a century-old beech tree weathering an attack; and a now-endangered wild Atlantic salmon. Each is quite exquisite, the writing so imaginative. So too “You Know Who You Are” (Polwart with Pippa Murphy), a lilting and delicate hymn to “a little bird”, of “starlight and bone/the constellations guide you home”. “Hold Everything” (Polwart again), inspired by John Berger’s book Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance, is profound and moving.
Looking For the Thread is a keeper of an album – it’s only January but I know it will be a highlight of the year. It’s thought-provoking yet soothing, the timbres and the textures, the sound world, the voices (no one sounds like Carpenter; so distinctive), make you want to play it over and over. It's a class act, heartfelt and beautifully crafted. It deserves to be heavily garlanded.
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