Mary Chapin Carpenter / Brandy Clark

One of life’s most satisfying sensations is the click of a realization. Something blurry coming into sharp focus. Mary Chapin Carpenter can vividly recall just such an epiphany.

“A novel that I’ve loved for years is My Name is Lucy Barton, written by Elizabeth Strout,” says the singer-songwriter. “There’s this moment where the main character is taking a creative writing course, and her teacher says to her, ‘You will only have one story. You will write your one story in many ways.’ I remember reading that line and taking an audible breath. In that moment, I said out loud to no one, ‘Oh, that’s what the songs are.’”

Carpenter has been writing that story for nearly 40 years, enjoying commercial success through numerous hit singles and 17 million albums sold, universal critical acclaim, a bounty of awards — including five Grammy wins from 18 nominations — and the respect of multiple generations of her songwriting peers, earning herself a place as one of 22 women in the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. Her most recent album, “One Night Lonely” from 2021, received a Grammy nod exactly 30 years after her very first nomination.   In “Personal History”, her 17th album, she presents a set of songs more autobiographical than any collection that has come before, offering songs as memoir, when the wisdom that comes from growing older becomes a north star, whether one is celebrating life’s joys or navigating life’s inevitable losses.  The title is taken from the album’s opener, “What Did You Miss.” The music is both buoyant and wistful, as she sings in her rich alto, “I’ve been walking in circles for so long/Unwinding the mystery/I’ve been writing it down song by song/As a personal history.”

The track’s blend of pandemic musings with more joyful distant memories — of steamed-up dive bar windows and late-night porch sessions — suggests what will follow, with memory, time and place guiding the narrative from a young girl’s love affair with songwriting to a woman at peace with her choices and where they have led her.  “It’s not necessarily chronological,” however, she says of the album. “The sequencing traces life backwards and forwards. But every song is connected to something deeply personal.”

“Paint + Turpentine” flashes back to Carpenter’s mid-20s and 30s and a missed opportunity: an invitation from Guy Clark, a hero of hers, to sit down and write together. “It’s about finding peace with a long-held regret of mine,” she says of being too intimidated to sit with the legend.  But thankfully, “life allows you to eventually understand and accept how things turned out. Some gifts take their time.”  “Bitter Ender,” with its keening harmonica, is a self-lacerating ode to her history of dying on clearly indefensible romantic hills. “Know thyself,” says Carpenter with a laugh.

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