MARY CHAPIN CARPENTER

From great pain comes great beauty. Acclaimed singer-songwriter Mary Chapin Carpenter has been through enormous difficulties in recent years. But the anguish of her experiences has resulted in a stunningly beautiful collection of songs. The troubadour’s new Ashes and Roses album ranks as her most powerful in years, perhaps even her strongest ever.

“They say that the worst, the most traumatic things that people can go through in their lives are a divorce, the loss of a parent and serious illness,” she says. “All of those things have happened to me in the last few years."

“So these are the songs that came about when I started to write. To try and push them away, or write about something else, did not seem possible. Songwriting is what I do. This is how I make sense of things, it’s how I seek connection and make my way through the world."