Mary Chapin Carpenter – Between Here & Gone

“What Would You Say To Me”, the leadoff track on Mary Chapin Carpenter’s new album, is her blatant bid to get back on country radio for the first time since 1999. The song opens with a fiddle solo, which introduces the perky, bouncy melody Carpenter applies to her simple, repetitive lyrics about meeting an old lover on the street. It’s Carpenter at her most commercial — which means it’s Carpenter at her best.

I’m not one of those revisionist contrarians who argue that mainstream country is somehow superior to folk or alt-country — Rodney Crowell, to cite one example, has really blossomed since leaving the mainstream behind — but certain artists need the constraints of Music Row to bring their talents into focus, and Carpenter is one of them. It’s precisely because she’s so smart and so facile with language that she needs to channel her expansive ambitions through the nozzles of a pleasurable melody and a plainspoken story.

When she gets carried away with her poetic muse and tries to deliver an ambitious literary conceit over a minimalist melody and a static rhythm in a hushed, portentous voice — as she does here on “My Heaven”, “Goodnight America”, “Shelter Of The Storms”, “Elysium” and the title track — her songs grow amorphous and boring. She’s far better off when she imitates the hook-savvy early work of Joni Mitchell, as she does on “Girls Like Me” and “Grand Central Station”, or follows the lead of her own country-pop hits of the ’90s, as she does on “Luna’s Gone”, “Beautiful Racket” and “River”.